I’ve been helping my DD and friends explore colleges and universities that will prepare them for a career in science and graduate school. I did some analyses on the baccalaureate institution of origin for awardees of the NSF graduate fellowships from 2010-2016. To get one of these awards, the student must have demonstrated significant research potential—which means they must have had both a strong science education and good research opportunities as undergraduate.
I’m posting the tables I generated here because I think they might help other students in their search for colleges. Also it may help students find colleges they’ve never heard that have strong programs for undergrads in their area of interest. The numbers are not adjusted for institution size. Some institutions have 30,000 undergrads; others, 1500. So you need to think about the size of the institution when using this.
Background
The National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships are a prestigious 3-year fellowship for graduate work in STEM fields. “The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and in STEM education. The GRFP provides three years of support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements in STEM and STEM education.” One of it’s goals is to support diversity so tilts towards women and minorities, but definitely men and non-minorities are awarded these too.
I downloaded the tables for 2010-2016 here.
https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=sort
The NSF data shows the baccalaureate institution of the person getting the award and shows the field in which they will be doing research. I condensed the field of study info into the broader fields of Chemistry, Physics, Life Sciences, Psychology, Social Sciences, Geosciences, Computer Science, and Math. I excluded Engineering, Education and Materials Research. If you want the R code in order to drill down on the data yourself, you can PM me.
The fields (column headings) is taken from the field code listed on the NSF tables which the exception that Life Sciences was broken into ‘Environmental/Organismal’ + ‘Lab’ life sciences. Math includes statistics and informatics (incl biostatistics).
EnviSci=Life Sciences with these codes: “Ecology”,“ecology”,“Population Biology”,
“Conservation Biology”,“Conservation Genetics”,“Wildlife”,“Zoology”,“Forestry”,
“Marine Biology”,“Marine Science”,“Biodiversity”,“Systems Biology”,
“Evolutionary Biology”,“Environmental Management”,“marine biology”,
“Entomology”,“Animal Behavior”,“Biological Oceanography”,“Biogeography”,“Animal behavior”,
“Organismal Biology”,“Evolutionary Biology”,“Environmental Sciences”,“Environmental Biology”,
“Botany”,“Paleobiology”
LifeSci=Life Sciences that are not “EnvSci”. Mainly cellular, molecular, developmental, microbial, neuro biology plus genetics and genomics. Biostatistics, computational biology and bioinformatics listed under math
Math=Math+Statistics. Includes any award listed under mathematical sciences plus biostatistics, computational biology bioinformatics (listed under life sciences)
total=total number of awardees with that institution from 2010-2016 with a proposed research topic in the fields listed.
I had to put the institution on the right to get the table formatting to work on CC.
Tables start next post (character limits)