The National Science Foundation awards around 900 graduate fellowships each year to a wide variety of sciences, including everything from linguistics and mathematics to physics. These fellowships are a big deal, being both very hard to get and making a significant impact on the finances of the awardees.

NSF has not yet officially contacted awardees for 2008, but word is spreading rapidly. Last night, some enterprising hopefully applicants hacked the NSF website to get the list of awardees. By morning, a number of applicants had logged on to the NSF applicant website and found an "accept fellowship" link on their applicant homepage. A little later in the morning, the list was made available on the website, though the page itself claimed that the awards list was still not available (that has now, as of this afternoon, been fixed).

So, which universities cleaned up? This is an incomplete survey of the 913 awards made:

Berkeley: 87
Stanford: 58
MIT: 40
Harvard: 36
University of Washington: 25
Cornell: 23
University of Michigan: 22
Princeton: 21
Columbia: 19
Yale: 18
UC-San Francisco: 17
Northwestern: 17
UT-Austin: 16
CalTech: 16
Rice: 14
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 13
University of Chicago: 12
Carnegie Mellon: 11
University of Florida: 11
Duke: 12
UCLA: 10

This doesn't list universities that got fewer awards, and it also doesn't account for 73 entering graduate students who did not list what university they will be attending, or any number of entering graduate students who haven't made up their minds and may switch universities. But it is a rough count.

What matters most, though, of the list, is that Oberlin beat Swarthmore 5 to 3.