Having trouble translating a MySQL query

I'm having trouble translating the following:

select sum(if(grad="1998",1,0)) as "1998",sum(if(grad="1999",1,0)) as "1999",sum(if(grad="2000",1,0)) as "2000", sum(if(grad="2001",1,0)) as "2001", sum(if(grad="2002",1,0)) as "2002",sum(if(grad="2003",1,0)) as "2003", sum(if(grad="2004",1,0)) as "2004",sum(if(grad="2005",1,0)) as "2005" from students;

The reason for this instead of separate select count(*) from students where grad="whatever" is because it's significantly faster - goes through the whole table once instead of 8 times. Postgres seems to also suffer from speed degradion from select count(*)'s. (this needs to be faster because this loads from PHP on a webpage, and there is a difference in loading time. I can't use MySQL because, well, it's being phased out for 'compliance' adaptation. I can't say anything to that.)

Is there something I should look into? I couldn't find the if() function anywhere in the Postgres documentation.

Thanks in advance.

I found a solution, but just in case anyone here might have an enlightening comment...

select grad,count(*) from students group by students.grad;

This not only really speeds Postgres up, it also speeds up on MySQL.