Notes for Interpreting Graduate Statistical Information

General

A graduate student is a person working toward a master’s or doctoral degree or earning a school administrator’s credential. Students must be admitted to this status in order to earn a degree. The following students are not included in these tabulations:

  • Students pursuing professional law (JD), medicine (MD), or dentistry (DDS) degrees
  • Graduate non-matriculated students
  • Students enrolled in ‘self-sustaining’ graduate programs such as the Executive MBA and Televised Instruction in Engineering (prior to 1997 only)

For the purposes of these tabulations, ethnic minority status includes students classified racially in the UW Student Database (SDB) as African American, Native American, Hispanic American, Asian American, or individuals of mixed race.

International students are students who hold student or other temporary visas. International students are not included in ethnic minority groupings.

Zeroes and blanks have a different meaning on the report. Blanks indicate missing data or not applicable (i.e. the department was not yet formed or degree data is not yet available).

Enrollment

Data Source: Enrollment statistics from the ‘Mini-Master’ dataset extracted from the SDB at the end of the tenth day of instruction of a given Autumn Quarter. Late registrants and those on-leave are not counted.

Enrollment headcounts are reported on the basis of the student’s primary major department (first coded major in the SDB). Thus, students in concurrent programs are counted only once, in the primary major department. This unduplicated headcount means that total enrollment is the sum of branch campus and Seattle campus enrollees.

Full-Time enrollment includes students enrolled for nine or more credits prior to 1997 and ten or more credit for 1997 and after. Auditing students (those enrolled for a total of zero credits) are not included in enrollment tabulations.

Total Enrollment includes the categories ‘New Student’, ‘Continuing’, and ‘Returning from On-Leave’. Returning students are not identified separately in the tabulations, so ‘New Student’ plus ‘Continuing’ will not equal ‘Total Enrollment’.

Although they are often excluded from Washington State enrollment reporting, faculty, staff, and State employees enrolled under the tuition exemption program are included in these tabulations.

Enrollment reporting changed in 1997 to include those enrolled in self-sustaining programs. The increase in enrollment from 1996 to 1997 is largely due to this reporting change.

Admissions

Data Source: Admissions data are derived from an image of the University of Washington’s application dataset of the (SDB) taken shortly after the tenth day of the quarter.

Total ‘Annual Applications’ include all applications received Summer Quarter of the report year through the following Spring Quarter. ‘Autumn Applications’ include all applications received for Autumn Quarter of the indicated year. Note that withdrawn and incomplete applications are included in the totals, though they are not reported separately.

Applicant Average Graduate Record Exam (GRE) Scores – if an applicant has multiple GRE scores (i.e. multiple Verbal scores) for a given time period the highest score is used.

Critical Note: GRE general test was modified August 2011 and score ranges changed from 200-800 to 130-170. This has a dramatic effect on mean scores across years. ETS provides further details on this change.

Note: Graduate School Report 2 issued July 2010 uses methods that differ from reports on this page. In contrast to Report 2, these reports include withdrawn and deferred applications, report only for Autumn Quarter, do not count concurrent students separately for each application major, and count all interdisciplinary graduate programs under the Graduate School. For further information see Report 2, Data Sources and Methods.

Degrees

Data Source: Degree Statistics are from the Student Database (SDB) degree dataset. Doctoral candidate information comes from the Graduate School’s degree database. The annual report period includes degrees granted from Summer Quarter through Spring Quarter.