Overview 
Survey Design
Survey Quality Measures
Trend Data
Availability of Data
1. Overview (2008 survey cycle) 
a. Purpose
The National Survey of Recent College Graduates (NSRCG) provides information about individuals who recently obtained bachelor's or master's degrees in a science, engineering, or health (SEH) field. This group is of special interest to many decision makers because it represents individuals who have recently made the transition from school to the workplace. The survey also provides information about individuals attending graduate school. The results of this survey are vital for educational planners within the federal government and in academia. Employers in all sectors (education, industry, and government) use these survey results to understand and predict trends in employment opportunities and salaries in SEH fields for recent graduates and to evaluate the effectiveness of equal opportunity efforts. This survey is a component of the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT), which provides data on the total number and characteristics of individuals with education or employment in SEH fields in the United States.
b. Respondents
Respondents are individuals who recently received bachelor's or master's degrees in an SEH field from a U.S. institution, were living in the United States during the survey reference week of 1 October 2008, and were under age 76.
c. Key variables
- Age
- Citizenship status
- Country of birth
- Country of citizenship
- Disability status
- Educational history (for each degree held: field, level, when received)
- Employment status (unemployed, employed part time, or employed full time)
- Educational attainment of parents
- Financial support and debt amount for undergraduate and graduate degree
- Geographic place of employment
- Marital status
- Number of children
- Occupation (current or previous job)
- Place of birth
- Work activity (e.g., teaching, basic research, etc.)
- Race/ethnicity
- Salary
- Overall satisfaction with principal job
- School enrollment status
- Sector of employment (e.g., academia, industry, government, etc.)
- Sex
- Work-related training
2. Survey Design
a. Target population and sample frame
The target population of the 2008 survey consisted of all individuals
- Under the age of 76 as of the survey reference date of 1 October 2008 (i.e., born after 30 September 1932),
- Who received a bachelor's or master's degree in an SEH field from a U.S institution between 1 July 2005 and 30 June 2007, and
- Who were living in the United States during the survey reference week of 1 October 2008.
The NSRCG sample is a two-stage sample: at the first stage a sample of institutions is selected, and at the second stage a sample of graduates is selected from lists provided by the sampled institutions. The sample frame of schools for inclusion in the first stage is obtained from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics.
For the 2008 NSRCG the first stage institution sample frame consisted of 2,027 U.S. postsecondary institutions that conferred at least one bachelor's or master's degree in an SEH field during the 2006 and 2007 academic years (AY). For the selection of graduates in the second stage the sample frame was constructed from lists of graduates obtained from representatives of the institutions selected at the first stage. The second stage sample frame of graduates consisted of 1,977,451 records. Of these records, only 799,205 graduates were eligible for the second stage selection of graduates.
b. Sample design
The first stage of the sample was selected with probability proportional to size (PPS). A composite size measure was related to the number of eligible graduates, controlling for sample size domains defined by degree level, field of major, race/ethnicity, and sex. Institutions that produce relatively large numbers of bachelor's or master's degrees were selected with certainty. Institutions selected proportionately to a measure of size reflected the maximum percentage of graduates in each of the degree fields within level of degree categories. The measure of size was adjusted to increase the probability of selection of institutions with relatively high percentages of graduates in targeted minority groups.
To maintain the efficiency of the institution sample, all 300 institutions selected for the NSRCG in 2003 and 2006 were retained for the 2008 sample. Of the 300 institutions sampled for the 2003 and 2006 NSRCG, two were ineligible for 2008 NSRCG because they did not confer any degrees in SEH fields during AY 06. Although a total of 295 institutions were identified as newly eligible for the 2008 NSRCG, none of these 295 institutions was large enough to be selected with certainty. Using a PPS sample selection procedure, a supplemental sample of four institutions was drawn from the list of the 2008 newly eligible NSRCG institutions. Therefore, the NSRCG institution sample size increased from 300 in 2006 to 302 in 2008. Six institutions from U.S. territories are in the sample; all were selected in 2003. In 2003 and 2006, eleven historically black institutions were selected and remained in the 2008 NSRCG sample.
The second stage sampling consisted of selecting 18,000 bachelor's or master's degree recipients (9,000 for each AY) who received science, engineering or health degrees from the institutions selected in the first stage. Composite size measures were used to incorporate differential sampling rates for domains subject to over- or under-sampling to satisfy various analytical interests, including minority representation in SEH fields [1]. To formulate the composite size measure for institutions, 222 domains were identified and used, which consisted of combinations from the following four variables:
- Degree types: 2—bachelor's and master's
- Major fields of study: 20 for the bachelor's and 17 for the master's.
- Race/ethnicity groups: 3—non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian and Pacific Islander and Underrepresented minorities: Black, Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native
- Sex: 2—male and female
Institution-level sample sizes of the graduates were calculated separately for certainty and non-certainty institutions to achieve equal weights within key NSRCG domains across institutions. A proportional allocation of the total sample to 84 certainty institutions resulted in institution-level sample sizes of 41 to 232 for those institutions. The noncertainty institutions were implicitly stratified by sorting the list by type of control (public, private), geographic region (northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest), and the percentage of degrees awarded in SEH fields of study. An equal sample allocation was constructed for each of 204 responding non-certainty institutions. However, not all non-certainty institutions had enough numbers of students, thus the sample allocation resulted in institution-level sample sizes of 12 to 122 for those institutions. The 288 participating institutions provided the total sample of 18,000 graduates (10,159 bachelor's and 7,841 master's recipients).
c. Data collection techniques
In 2008 Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., under contract with Division of Science Resource Statistics (now the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, NCSES), conducted the first stage list data collection and the second stage survey data collection for sampled individuals. The first stage data collection began with contacting the 302 sampled institutions to obtain their lists of graduates for AY 2006 and AY 2007. Of the 302 sampled institutions, 288 provided lists of graduates and 14 did not.
The second stage survey data collection for sampled individuals used three data collection modes—paper, Web, and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). Paper and Web were the primary modes in the initial stage of data collection, followed by CATI. The 2008 CATI and Web survey instruments were modeled after, and were very similar to the 2008 paper questionnaire used in the mail phase. The NSRCG questionnaire instruments were designed to be as similar as possible to the survey instruments used in the 2008 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) and the 2008 Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) to facilitate combining results into estimates of the total SEH population. A few questions in the NSRCG, however, obtain information of special interest for the population of recent graduates. For example, the NSRCG had more information related to education history than did the NSCG or SDR.
Information in the 2008 survey was collected for the reference week of 1 October 2008. Data collection took place between November 2008 and May 2009.
d. Estimation techniques
Weights are attached to each responding graduate record to estimate characteristics of the population of graduates. The weights were created in the following stages:
- Create an institution base weight that was the inverse of the probability of selecting the institution
- Adjust institution base weights for nonresponse by creating nonresponse adjustment cells based on institutional control and size
- Multiply institution weights by the inverse of the probability of selecting the graduate within the institution to form a graduate weight
- Adjust graduate weights for nonresponse by using weighting cells based on year of graduation, degree, major field of study, sex, and race/ethnicity (foreign address graduates were a separate cell)
- Further modify graduate nonresponse adjusted weights to account for the possibility that the graduates could have been selected twice; graduates who obtained more than one degree during the time period (e.g., both a bachelor's and a master's degree) could have been sampled twice
- Enhance the precision of the 2008 NSRCG estimates by raking to ensure that graduate respondents' adjusted weights conform to each of know marginal distributions of the auxiliary variables
In addition to creating estimation weights for each graduate, a hot deck imputation procedure was used to estimate missing item values, using responses from other graduates who had similar characteristics (age, major, sex, etc.).
3. Survey Quality Measures
a. Sampling variability
The sample size is sufficiently large that estimates based on the total sample should be subject to minimal sampling error. However, sampling error can be quite substantial in estimating the characteristics of small subgroups of the population. Estimates of the sampling errors associated with various measures are included in the methodology report for the survey and in the basic publications.
b. Coverage
A major source of coverage error is when institutions don't identify a graduate as having received a degree of interest. This failure can arise when institutional records are incorrect (e.g., when incorrect dates for degree receipts are recorded or incorrect degree fields are recorded). It also can arise because of the difficulty in correctly classifying the degree fields granted into the taxonomy that NSF uses to identify whether the degree field is in-scope. To minimize the impact of this latter problem, graduates with ambiguous degree fields are included in the sample and eliminated if their survey responses indicate they are out-of-scope.
c. Nonresponse
(1) Unit nonresponse - The unweighted response rate for the first stage (institution-level response rate) was 95.4%; the weighted response rate was 94.2%. The unweighted response rate for the second stage (graduates response rate) was 71.4%; the weighted response rate was 69.7%.
(2) Item nonresponse - In 2008, the item nonresponse rate for key items (employment status, type of employment, occupation, and primary work activity) ranged from 0.0% to 2.0%. Other variables, especially those involving sensitive information, had higher nonresponse rates. For example, the reason for working outside field of highest degree had item nonresponse rates of approximately 10.1% to 10.6%. A hot deck imputation procedure was used to impute all missing data items, except for the critical complete items and verbatim text items. Any cases missing the critical complete items were considered as survey nonresponse.
d. Measurement
Several of the variables in this survey are difficult to measure and thus are relatively prone to measurement error. For example, an individual does not always know how his/her occupation would be defined by experts in the field and may thus select an occupational field that is technically incorrect. To reduce measurement error, the instrument was pretested, using cognitive interviewing.
As is true for any multi-modal survey, it is likely that the measurement errors associated with the different modalities are somewhat different. This possible source of measurement error is especially troublesome, because the proclivity to respond by one mode or the other is likely to be associated with variables of interest in the survey. To the extent that certain types of individuals may be relatively likely to respond by one mode compared with another, the multi-modal approach may have introduced some systematic biases into the data. A study of differences across modes is being planned to evaluate the data.
To examine the potential nonresponse bias in the 2003 NSRCG data, a nonresponse analysis study was conducted and the results showed that any detectable differences were properly addressed by the nonresponse weighting adjustments of the survey data [2].
4. Trend Data
There have been a number of changes in the definition of the population surveyed over time. For example, the surveys conducted in the 1980s included individuals receiving bachelor's degrees in the field of engineering technology; these individuals have been excluded from surveys conducted since 1993. The survey improvements were sufficient enough to caution the use of trend analyses conducted using the 1993 NSRCG and the NSRCG in prior years, if at all. Changes to the 2008 reference date to October instead of April, which was used in 2006 survey, may result in some seasonal differences being reflected when the 2008 NSRCG data are compared to 2006 NSRCG data.
5. Availability of Data
a. Publications
The data from this survey are published biennially in Detailed Statistical Tables in the series Characteristics of Recent Science and Engineering Graduates, as well as in InfoBriefs and Special Reports.
Information from this survey is also included in Science and Engineering Indicators and Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities in Science and Engineering.
b. Electronic access
Data from this survey are available on the NCSES Web site and on the SESTAT Web site. Selected aggregate data are available in public use data files upon request. Access to restricted data for researchers interested in analyzing microdata can be arranged through a licensing agreement.
c. Contact for more information
Additional information about this survey can be obtained by contacting:
Flora Lan
Project Officer
Human Resources Statistics Program
National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 965
Arlington, VA 22230
Phone: (703) 292-4758
E-mail: flan@nsf.gov
Footnotes
[1] See Folsom RE, Potter FJ, Williams SR. 1987. Notes on a Composite Measure for Self-Weighting Samples in Multiple Domains. Proceedings of the Section on Survey Research Methods, American Statistical Association, 792–796.
[2] See Dajani A, Maples J. 2005. The 2003 NSF/RCG Nonresponse Bias Analysis. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
