The "PhD productivity rate" estimates of the proportion of an institution's bachelor's degree recipients that go on to obtain the doctorate degree within 9 years.
The data source for doctoral degree counts and the baccalaureate origins of these is the National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates, which regularly attains response rates in excess of 90%.
The "PhD rate" is calculated as the number of doctorate degrees earned by bachelor's degree recipients at the listed college during a ten-year period, divided by the total number of baccalaureate graduates (data source: National Center for Education Statistics) from that institution during an offset 10-year period nine years earlier.
Science and engineering (STEM) includes psychology and social sciences, as per NSF definitions.
Method for estimating female PhD rates for 2007-2009:
Bryn Mawr is a single-sex institution and so the most appropriate benchmark for comparison with other institutions is the female-only rate, particularly for many STEM fields in which women are known to be underrepresented.
Beginning in 2007, the National Science Foundation stopped releasing data by gender at the level of individual baccalaureate institutions, due to concerns about maintaining confidentiality.
For the years 2007-2009, this report estimates the number of PhDs awarded to females based on the ratio of female PhDs to total PhDs for the 10-year period 1997-2006, multiplied by the total number of PhDs awarded for the period 2007-2009.
For instance, say institution X awarded 20 PhD degrees in the years 2007 to 2009, and 100 PhDs during the years 1997-2006. The gender of the twenty 2007-2009 PhD recipients is unknown, but suppose we know that 40% (i.e., 40) of the 100 PhDs awarded during the years 1997-2006 were female. It is reasonable to estimate that the proportion of females among those 20 PhDs awarded from 2007 to 2009 would be 40%, or eight.
This was the methodology used to estimate the number of female PhDs awarded for all baccalaureate institutions for the years 2007 to 2009. The estimates for these years were added to the actual figures for 2000 to 2006 to obtain the estimate of PhDs awarded for the most recent 10-year period from 2000 to 2009.
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