The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) apparently disagree on the number of international doctoral students in the US.
For example, according to the OECD data, in 2019 there were 88,530 mobile students enrolled in a doctoral program in the US (see line "United States", column "Mobile including homecoming nationals").
However, the SEVIS says (p.5) that:
There were 187,902 F-1 students who sought a doctoral degree in calendar year 2019.
There may be some 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". In particular, my guess is that the difference might come from the inclusion/exclusion of medical doctorates or professional doctorates. But this is just a guess, and I want to be sure.
My suspicion comes from the information I collected relative to the classification scheme used by the OECD (ISCED), which generally does not seem to consider M.D., J.D., etc., as doctorate level (happy to elaborate on that if it's useful, but I didn't want to post a too long question). However, no idea of what the SEVIS consider as doctorate level, hence my question here.
I asked a similar question on the opendata stackexchange website, in the hope of getting more detailed data from the SEVIS, which would probably answer my bottom-line question, but to no avail. Anyway, my problem is not really about getting data, but about explaining the discrepancy between the two sources.
If someone has any information that could help reconciling the apparently conflicting figures, I'd be interested.
Thanks,
P.S.: I originally asked this question, because a paper I read (NB: not published in a journal, but in a government publication from my country) on international PhD students makes a comparison between countries by relying on the OECD data, except for the US where it takes data from the SEVIS. There's no rationale given for this choice, and unfortunately the authors won't answer when contacting them about that. The paper in question is used as a reference in some academic papers, but I doubt its reliability because of the discrepancy between the two original sources.
But besides the case of these papers, it raised my curiosity as to why the figures would be different between these two sources. It may be useful in the future if I stumble other papers who use data communicated by the SEVIS, to know what we're talking about exactly.
