Academic research funds increased more rapidly than enrollments between 1950 and 1970 but little analysis has been made of the educational effects of the change. In part this is due to an assumption that benefits to education flow automatically from funding for university-based research. As a result most studies of graduate study report only dollar outcomes in terms of student support, facilities, or service. Recent work in the sociology of science has identified the importance of networks of communication, recognition, and visibility for the active scholars. The concept of awareness is adapted here to the assessment of student perceptions of the research activity around them. The notion is operationalized in two ways, by recognition and by association. It is concluded that awareness is a discrete and useful concept in this application, that it reveals about twice the level of involvement with research established by other methods, and that departmental policy plays a larger role than the characteristics of the field of knowledge in determining the educational consequences of research activity. (Author)