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The #NSFGRFP is an incredible opportunity... so I analyzed winners from 2011-20 to understand who gets it. The good news: things are slightly worse in 2018-20, but they're stable. The bad news: "stable" means >50% of awards go to undergrads or grads at the top *20* schools.
I first got interested in analyzing the #NSFGRFP data after a policy change, announced in 2016, changed eligibility rules. Many others aside from me (esp @hormiga, but for an exhaustive list, check out @jane_c_hu's article https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/08/nsf-graduate-fellowships-disproportionately-go-students-few-top-schools) have examined bias in the GRFP.
But I was interested in a quantitative evaluation of the policy change, which was theoretically supposed to bring in more diverse applicants from diverse undergraduate schools. So I looked at the # awards to students coming from baccalaureate institutions ranked by # of awards.
Over 10% of awards go to the 9 most selective schools (at a rate of 0.5% of the tiny! undergraduate student body getting them). That's 38x the rate at which the students from the ~60 least selective schools win them.)
Private schools costing $60k+ a year make up only 1.3% of schools in America (at least according to the College Score Card data I'm using). But their undergraduates get nearly 40% of #NSFGRFP awards.
But that's just for UG institution, and I have data for UG and grad. If you ask what % awards go to people who have *ONLY* gone to a top 20 school (whether undergraduate or grad), that's 20%. If you ask what % of awards go to people who have *EVER* gone to a top 20, that's 50%.
These numbers are the realities of 10 years of data and 20k awards, not just results of recent policy change. Funding and independence are an incredible opportunity for a graduate student and there are thousands of deserving students. It's not easy to know where it should go.
What we do know, from these numbers, is it's going to places which are already immensely selective and have immense resources. Perhaps it's even going to diverse students at those institutions. But is that where the gift of independence and funding could have the most impact?
Another thing we know: the 2017 policy change, if anything, increased the % of awards going to top institutions. The scientific community cares about creating change here, but as far as I can tell, that change hasn't happened anywhere in the last 10 years.
I'm not the first to run these numbers. Lots of others (eg @hormiga) have thought about this (see @jane_c_hu's article https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/08/nsf-graduate-fellowships-disproportionately-go-students-few-top-schools for a great summary). Thank you to them for inspiring me to continue, and to my cats for keeping me on task
/fin
/fin
