The 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey Released October 17, 2001
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Survey Methods

The National Doctoral Program Survey is an assessment of implementation of educational best practices in graduate education, as advocated by the Association of American Universities (1998), the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (1998), the Modern Language Association (1997), and the National Research Council's Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (1995) among others. The survey was based on the Graduate School Survey conducted by Dr. Geoff Davis and Dr. Peter Fiske at PhDs.org during the spring of 1999.

The 2000 survey was conducted on the Web between March 30, 2000, and August 15, 2000, and was open to anyone who had been enrolled in a doctoral program for at least one semester since January 1, 1995. Over the course of the survey, more than 32,600 current and recent doctoral students from over 5000 doctoral programs at about 400 graduate institutions participated.

The survey included questions in nine areas relevant to doctoral education: information for prospective students, curricular breadth and flexibility, teaching, professional development, career guidance and placement services, time to degree, faculty mentoring, program climate, and overall satisfaction. Each section contained a number of questions to be answered on a four-point Likert scale: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree (Don't Know and Not Applicable options are also available for each question). Each section also contained a free response box to allow respondents to expand upon their response to any questions in that section.

The National Doctoral Program Survey is an observational study, not a controlled experiment. The respondents do not constitute a random sample of all doctoral students, but rather are a self-selected population that is not necessarily representative of students overall. Despite the self-selection, there is important evidence that the concerns expressed represent widely held student opinions rather than a small but outspoken set of negative voices (see here for details).

Several measures were employed to promote the validity of responses. First, participants were asked to explicitly affirm that their responses were truthful, to the best of their knowledge. Second, participants were prompted for their email address, and a code was sent to that address. Participants were prompted for the code at the end of the survey to verify that the participant had provided a correct email address. Free text comments have been reported only for participants who verified their addresses in this fashion.

Program-level results are available for U.S. doctoral programs from which we received 10 or more responses. Program-level results from programs from which we received 5-9 responses are available in password-protected form to the participants, program chairs, and graduate deans for the corresponding programs.

These data will be useful to several different stakeholders in doctoral education.  University administrators and graduate students can use it to encourage departmental and/or university-wide change and improvements.  Program directors and faculty can assess student satisfaction and benchmark their programs against others in the field. Prospective students can gain further information about a program from the experiences of students recently enrolled. Further, the survey will compile a national data set of program-specific practices and provide comparison to other programs in the discipline; to make this data set accessible to the public and useful for individuals, departments, graduate student associations, and university administrators; and to inform the national discussion of implementation of best practices in graduate education.