The NY Times reports that undergraduate enrollments in computer science programs are back up. The explanation: competing alternatives for people with the required skill set have gotten less attractive. Investment banking is no longer luring people away. It's further supporting evidence for Richard Freeman's work ... read more

Nature this week has an opinion piece about the continued mediocre ranking of the US in standardized tests of mathematics and science. The authors claim that the tests don't really matter that much because 1) it's the proportion of very high scorers that matters, not the mean, and 2) a lot of the countries that... read more

There were two viewpoints that were in evidence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy meeting on graduate and postdoctoral education earlier this month. The first view, which was most thoughtfully articulated by Michael Teitelbaum, Vice President of the Sloan Foundation, is that the nationa... read more

I've just taken a look at the Senate's hefty bill to reauthorize the NSF, S 761. Like the House equivalent, there are some good and interesting things in the bill. * There is a lot of new money for graduate fellowships: **IGERT** - Increased funding to the IGERT program, like in the House bill. This would fu... read more

There have been a few bills working their way through Congress that seek to significantly increase the number of graduate students. Why now, at a time when people are asking, "Are we training too many PhDs?" Much of the current impetus comes from the National Academies report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm --... read more

Prolific commenter Bob has submitted a guest post - interesting stuff! There has been some discussion on this blog about whether we are producing too many PhDs, given the size of the job market. Some have stated that Congress is not likely to get involved with the issue of PhD production. That is currently not tr... read more