NSF Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates, 2024

Who holds the postdoc jobs

A postdoctoral appointment is the job an American doctorate leads to. It is the step between the degree and a faculty position or a research career, and roughly half of these posts are paid for with federal research money.

This page counts them by citizenship. A postdoc is counted as American here if they are a citizen or a permanent resident. Everyone else holds a temporary visa.

69,877

postdoctoral appointees

at 339 institutions, 2024

58.3%

hold a temporary visa

40,746 of 69,877

29,131

are American

citizens and permanent residents, 41.7%

48.1%

are federally supported

33,582 posts on federal money

Americans are a minority of the postdoctoral workforce

Not at nine universities. Nationally.

58.3% of postdoctoral appointees in the United States hold a temporary visa. American citizens and permanent residents are 41.7% — a minority of the people doing postdoctoral research in their own country, in a workforce where about half the posts are paid for by the federal government.

This is the measured finding. What follows is what it means for the nine universities named in October.

The nine named universities

On 8 October 2026 the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice announced an investigation into J-1 visa use at nine universities, and said that about 61% of postdoctoral researchers and federally funded workers at those institutions are foreign nationals, against a national average of 38%.

The first figure checks out. Computed from the NSF survey, the nine come to 60.7%: 8,545 of 14,080 postdocs on a temporary visa.

The second figure does not match this survey. The national average on the same measure is 58.3%, not 38%. The two numbers count different things, and the difference decides what the story is.

60.7%

the nine named universities

8,545 of 14,080 postdocs on a temporary visa

58.3%

every institution in the survey

40,746 of 69,877

The nine are not outliers. They are typical. They sit about 2.4 points above a national figure that is already over half.

That is the larger finding. If these nine were far above a low national average, this would be a story about nine universities and an enforcement action would address it. They are not. On this measure the American postdoctoral workforce is a minority of itself everywhere, and the nine named institutions look much like the rest of the country.

Institution	Postdocs	Temporary visa	American	Share foreign
Yale University	1,458	1,015	443	69.6%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	1,452	988	464	68.0%
California Institute of Technology	574	388	186	67.6%
Stanford University	2,645	1,723	922	65.1%
University of California, Davis	679	441	238	64.9%
Arizona State University	311	193	118	62.1%
University of Pittsburgh	826	482	344	58.4%
Harvard University	5,813	3,142	2,671	54.1%
Brown University	322	173	149	53.7%
The nine together	14,080	8,545	5,535	60.7%
Every institution surveyed	69,877	40,746	29,131	58.3%

Institutions are matched on their federal UNITID, not on their name. The investigation was announced on 8 October 2026. This page reports that it was announced and what the survey counts. It makes no claim that any institution broke a law.

The institutions with the highest shares

Every institution reporting at least 50 postdocs, ranked by the share holding a temporary visa. The nine named universities are shown in bold where they appear.

Missouri University of Science and Technology (56)94.6%

University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, The (595)86.2%

University of Tennessee, The, Health Science Center (90)85.6%

Augusta University (133)85.0%

University of Missouri, Columbia (381)84.5%

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, The (369)81.6%

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, The (602)79.7%

Case Western Reserve University (243)79.4%

Albert Einstein College of Medicine (240)78.8%

Cornell University (488)78.5%

University of Oklahoma, The (87)78.2%

Rice University (231)77.1%

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (142)76.8%

Mayo Clinic, Mayo Graduate School (833)76.6%

Southern Methodist University (64)76.6%

University of Mississippi, The (106)76.4%

City of Hope, Irell and Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences (197)75.1%

Kansas State University (77)74.0%

University of Nebraska Medical Center (134)73.1%

University of Houston (212)73.1%

Northwestern University (1,090)72.8%

University of South Carolina (114)72.8%

Texas A&M University (580)72.4%

Georgia Institute of Technology (352)72.2%

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (527)72.1%

0%25%50% 75%100%

175 institutions clear the floor of 50 postdocs. A unit with nine postdocs and six on a visa is 67% and tells a reader nothing, which is why the floor exists.

Who pays for the posts

48.1% of postdoctoral appointments are federally supported — 33,582 posts.

Federal source	Postdocs supported
NIH	19,413
NSF	3,913
Defense	2,452
Energy	2,245
Agriculture	1,166
HHS	1,037
NASA	701

The survey reports how many postdocs are federally supported and how many hold a temporary visa. It does not report how many are both, so these two figures cannot be multiplied. A page that multiplied them would be inventing a number the survey does not contain.

Method and limits

What this counts, and what it cannot.

A postdoc counted as foreign holds a temporary visa. US citizens and permanent residents are counted as American.
The survey reports how many postdocs are federally supported and how many are foreign. It does not report how many are both, so the two figures cannot be multiplied.
Figures are summed from organisational units to the institution. A single GSS row is a school or department, not a university.
This counts postdoctoral appointees. Graduate students are a different population and are measured separately.

Source: NSF NCSES, Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates, 2024. https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/graduate-students-postdoctorates-s-e/. Built by scripts/build_postdoc_citizenship.py from the institution microdata, summed from organisational units to institutions.