Crowd Out or Opt Out: The Changing Landscape of Doctorate Production in American Universities

This paper addresses two issues arising from the changing pattern of doctorate production in American universities in last forty years. First, there has been a large increase in the number of doctorates awarded to foreign students. This leads to the concern that foreign doctorates have crowded out native doctorates especially certain groups of native doctorates such as native male and minorities. Second, graduate programs are increasingly becoming “feminine,” and some academic fields have already witnessed a ratcheting process toward female. This gives rise to concern about gender segregation among academic fields. Using data on the number of doctorates awarded in all academic fields from 1966 to 2002, this study examines the crowding-out effect and the tipping effect systematically. In science and engineering fields, there is no evidence of crowding-out between foreign doctorates and native doctorates. Outside of science and engineering, there is a strong negative correlation between the number of foreign doctorates and native male doctorates; however, non-science education accounts for almost all the negative association, suggesting the inappropriateness of aggregating fields in examining the crowding-out effect. Male students, especially native male students, exhibit strong “women-avoiding” behaviors in selecting academic fields of doctoral study, suggesting that native male students opt out of, instead of being crowded out of fields with a high proportion of female doctorates. As the gender composition of college graduates has started to stabilize in recent years, it is unlikely that those fields that already have a high proportion of female doctorates will be tipping toward all female

Do Measures of College Quality Matter? The Effect of College Quality on Graduates’ Earnings

This study reviews and explores the varying effects of college quality caused by different measure of college quality, including Barron’s ratings, mean SAT scores of entering freshman class, tuition and fees, and Carnegie Classification. Data for this research come from NCES’ Baccalaureate & Beyond study. Results suggest that the estimated effect of college quality is sensitive to the measure of college quality, suggesting that different measures of college quality may provide partial explanation for the varying effect of college quality in previous studies. More importantly, the current analysis shows that the common wisdom that it pays to attend high-quality colleges is robust to these measures

Does Public Funding for Higher Education Matter?

This study uses panel data to examine the direct link between state funding and graduation rates at four-year public institutions. When other factors are held constant, a $1,000 increase in state appropriations per FTE student at four-year public institutions is associated with about a one percentage point increase in graduation rates. This positive link appears to hold for all research/doctoral, masters, and baccalaureate institutions. In addition, there is evidence that modest increases (or a decrease) in state funding are associated with rapid increases in tuition rates charged at four-year public institutions, which likely result in an additional negative impact on graduation rates. Simply put, there is no such a thing as free lunch when it comes to graduation rates at public higher education institutions

The wavefunction reconstruction effects in calculation of DM-induced electronic transition in semiconductor targets

The physics of the electronic excitation in semiconductors induced by sub-GeV dark matter (DM) have been extensively discussed in literature, under the framework of the standard plane wave (PW) and pseudopotential calculation scheme. In this paper, we investigate the implication of the all-electron (AE) reconstruction on estimation of the DM-induced electronic transition event rates. As a benchmark study, we first calculate the wavefunctions in silicon and germanium bulk crystals based on both the AE and pseudo (PS) schemes within the projector augmented wave (PAW) framework, and then make comparisons between the calculated excitation event rates obtained from these two approaches. It turns out that in process where large momentum transfer is kinetically allowed, the two calculated event rates can differ by a factor of a few. Such discrepancies are found to stem from the high-momentum components neglected in the PS scheme. It is thus implied that the correction from the AE wavefunction in the core region is necessary for an accurate estimate of the DM-induced transition event rate in semiconductors.Comment: A missing factor $64^{-3/2}=1/512$ associated with the Fourier transformation is added to both the AE and PS event rates in this version. The ratio between the AE and PS event rates is not affecte

Criterion on remote clocks synchronization within a Heisenberg scaling accuracy

We propose a quantum method to judge whether two spatially separated clocks have been synchronized within a specific accuracy $\sigma$. If the measurement result of the experiment is obviously a nonzero value, the time difference between two clocks is smaller than $\sigma$; otherwise the difference is beyond $\sigma$. On sharing the 2$N$-qubit bipartite maximally entangled state in this scheme, the accuracy of judgement can be enhanced to $\sigma\sim{\pi}/{(\omega(N+1))}$. This criterion is consistent with Heisenberg scaling that can be considered as beating standard quantum limit, moreover, the unbiased estimation condition is not necessary.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur