THE
PHYSICS RANKINGS PROJECT

Physics in the U.S.

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Physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering are fundamental to the basic philosophies of western society. These disciplines underpin modern life on our planet; medicine, the internet, transportation, power consumption, communications ... For the University community they are as fundamental and central to core missions as learning to write well, or how make logical argument. The highest expression of scholarship in these fields is the PhD. degree. Such programs bring faculty together to deepen understanding of current trends and keep them aware of important paradigm shifts that challenge existing traditions of thought. 

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There are a number of studies going back to the 90's that examine whether or not primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI's) or R1 research universities are better at preparing students to be successful and happy in STEM careers. From a meta analysis of these studies we can gather several important facts: 1) None of them suggest that colleges do better at preparing students for the world they live in WITHOUT physics, chemistry, biology departments. Liberal arts colleges and their two state university systems should take note. Getting rid of that expensive physics department harms your student's overall preparation for life and career. 2) PUIs and liberal arts college offer a higher proportion of their graduates to PhD programs than do R1 institutions. Note however, this is true only among an elite few PUIs and colleges such as Williams or Harvey Mudd and is NOT true among the larger set of colleges and universities.  In other words a few schools skew the data in most analyses. 3) Increased mentorship is normally named as the causal factor in STEM retention through PHD when a student comes from a PUI or liberal arts college. Yet it is also clear that such students are significantly less well prepared for graduate students in the broader context of physics skills. There is in fact, little correlation between success as a PhD student and undergraduate GPA, but there is a strong correlation between success and access to early undergraduate career research and such success. There too, does seem to be sufficient evidence to hypothesize that the primary effect of focused undergraduate mentoring is to instill confidence and self belief in students, which leads to choices that lead to Graduate school. But do they stay in STEM as career scientists, and are they successful in those career paths? This leads to our last point: 4) there are very few (in fact almost none) critical studies examining the overall success as a scientist based upon undergraduate preparation metrics. What can be said is that creative, clever people come in different packages. "Fit" to a career path and programmatic details is important. What makes an Einstein in one scenario fails in another.

 

So what does this mean? Whether you are a PUI, liberal arts college, or R1 research school, STEM education is expensive, messy in its construction, sometimes controversial: but it is also essential to being an excellent college/university. And while everyone expects there to be evolution in these departments and their structure, cutting or consolidating such efforts on campus altogether erodes the very fabric of our educational system and is a betrayal of best educational practices. And we note that as of this writing in the U.S. over the past 20 years we have lost multiple excellent physics programs at colleges and universities nationwide, while in that time period not one new program has appeared. This is NOT true in the rest of the world!