Graduate Students and Postdocs

The future science and technology workforce in the U.S. relies on support for graduate students and postdocs. For more than 40 years, the National Science Foundation has collected data on the sources of support for graduate students in each field at U.S. universities. In more recent years, this survey was expanded to include postdocs and to provide data for master’s versus doctoral students. We use these data to illustrate how support for graduate students and postdocs in each field has changed over time. To illustrate the importance of international scholars, we also include data on the percentage of foreign graduate students and postdocs at U.S. universities.