Education doctoral programs and others not assessed by NRC

This article in the Chronicle today discusses the exclusions from the National Research Council's recent survey of doctoral programs. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Excluded fields appear to have granted more than a quarter of all research doctorates from 2001 to 2005 to U.S. citizens and permanent residents—27 percent, according to our calculations, based on data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, conducted for the National Science Foundation and other government agencies. But African-American, American Indian, and Mexican-American people, as well as women, are disproportionately likelier to have received Ph.D.'s in fields that are not included in the NRC's assessment, relative to white men and Asian-American people. For example, 54 percent of African-American women, 49 percent of American Indian women, 43 percent of Mexican-American women, 42 percent of African-American men, and 34 percent of women in general were awarded doctorates in fields not currently assessed by the NRC.

What accounts, then, for this seemingly odd pattern of doctorates awarded to people in various demographic groups by fields included and excluded in the current NRC assessment? The exempted fields—including education, business, social work, psychological counseling, library science, home economics, and subfields of the health and agricultural sciences—share a professional and applied orientation as opposed to a basic research one. Many also emphasize public scholarship, a tradition that favors the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.