A heartening holiday article in the NY Times this week: A Master’s for Science Professionals Sweeps U.S. Schools. The Professional Science Masters is catching on big time: > The degree, which a few universities quietly pioneered in the mid-1990s, combines graduate studies in science or mathematics and business m... read more

Quiet on the blog is often good news: it means that web site improvements are in thw works. Today we've rolled out some nice speedups of the rankings site. One of the hazards of working with great hardware and software when developing a site is that it's easy to forget that there are lots of people running old b... read more

Those of you in Communication Research may have noticed something strange about the NRC R-rankings for the field on our site: until yesterday, the confidence intervals for programs almost all started at 1. That means that in our simulated rankings, almost all programs ended up in first place at least 25 times. Why... read more

Over the weekend I received another irate email from a department chair bemoaning the grievous and irreparable harm the terrible errors on phds.org were causing his program. I investigated. It turned out that the data in question came from the NSF's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Eng... read more

A little later this afternoon we will be launching a big update of our graduate school guide. The upgrade includes the long awaited new rankings from the National Research Council as well as new data from the National Science Foundation and IPEDS. We've also done a big upgrade of the look of the site with an e... read more

Another study links aerobic exercise to increased cognitive performance: Start running and watch your brain grow, say scientists Running (a lot of it) was found to improve the performance of mice on tests of memory. The mechanism: increased neurogenesis. There's a fair amount of evidence that exercise boos... read more

Did your graduate program not provide you with useful skills beyond what you needed to write your dissertation? MIT can help! A piece in today's NY Times describes MIT's Career Re-engineering program for scientists and engineers. There's definitely a need for this kind of training - people's careers and interes... read more

A former Clemson institutional researcher has just given an eye-opening presentation that described how the US News college rankings drove the agenda of Clemson's administration. The measures taken ranged from promising (decreases in class sizes and increases in admissions standards) to unethical (allegations that ... read more

There's an op-ed in yesterday's Times with a great opening paragraph: > Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is d... read more

A new TIAA-CREF survey of junior faculty at Master's granting colleges shows that alarmingly low numbers feel prepared for their jobs at the time of hiring. The interesting bit is Table 7, "Level of preparation for career responsibilities" After graduate school, % "very effectively" prepared: Conduct resear... read more

This month's *Wired* has more on the exercise/cognitive function connection : aerobic exercise helps, weight lifting doesn't. They also have a rundown on drugs that allegedly enhance cognitive functioning, handy for any who are thinking about emulating the 20% of scientists admitting to using brain-boosting drugs... read more

Mark Horowitz, Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education at Stanford, gave a talk at Google a few weeks ago about some of the things Stanford is working on to enhance the quality of its graduate programs. After many years (a decade or more?) of having no senior leadership with responsibility for graduate educat... 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

There's an interesting new bill working its way through the House: The Scientific Communications Act of 2007. (A tip of the hat to the fine folks over at ArsTechnica for cluing me in to its existence). The bill allocates $50 million over 5 years to the NSF to improve the communication skills of S&E graduate stud... read more

Scott Jaschik has written a nice piece on the new rankings at Inside Higher Ed. Here's the story.