In short, I'm looking for some detailed data about doctoral students registered in the US Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), broken down by type of doctoral degree (e.g. PhD vs. professional doctorates).
To give some context, if it's of any help: I'm conducting some research on international students, and I noticed an important discrepancy between the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data and the official figures given by the SEVIS, relative to the number of international doctoral students enrolled in the US.
For example, according to the OECD data, in 2019 there were 88,530 mobile students who were enrolled in a doctoral program in the US. However, the SEVIS says (p.5) that "There were 187,902 F-1 students who sought a doctoral degree in calendar year 2019". There might be a small difference between the definition of "mobile student" and "F-1 student", but I don't think that on its own it explains a difference of 100,000 people.
The most likely explanation I see is that the SEVIS definition of "doctoral program" differs from what the OECD calls "doctoral or equivalent level". Unfortunately, in the link mentioned above, the SEVIS does not give information on what they include in "doctoral programs".
My suspicion is that the SEVIS counts professional doctorates as doctoral degrees, while the OECD does not. But I'd like to make sure this is actually where the difference comes from, and I probably need more detailed data for that.
If you have some suggestions of other datasets or documents that might explain this difference, I'd be glad to hear about it!
Thank you,
