Top bachelor's-producing departments

Abstract

As we near the close of another academic year, we highlight departments in the United States that consistently award more physics bachelor's degrees than other similar departments. We categorize departments by the highest physics degree they award. Typically, departments that award a doctorate have more faculty members and more students; thus, one would expect these departments to have more undergraduate physics majors than departments that award a bachelor's degree only. During the 2013–14 academic year, we reached out to 743 departments that award a bachelor's degree in physics: 496 offer a bachelor's degree only, 56 offer up to a master's, and 191 offer up to a doctorate. Of the 496 that award a bachelor's degree only, about 18% averaged at least 10 bachelor's degrees per year between 2012 and 2014. Over 30% of the master's-granting departments averaged at least 10 bachelor's degrees per year over this same span. Finally, over 19% of the PhD-granting departments awarded an average of at least 30 bachelor's degrees per year for that time period. On our website, we have lists of the top bachelor's degree-producing departments by highest degree. (See https://www.aip.org/statistics/table4, https://www.aip.org/statistics/table5 and https://www.aip.org/statistics/table6 for the full list of departments by highest degree. Visit https://www.aip.org/statistics/undergraduate for all our data and reports on undergraduate education; updated lists of top bachelor's-producing departments will be available at this link early in the fall semester. Due to space limitations, we cannot list all 155 departments included in these tables, so this list includes the top 5% of departments in each group.