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The Survey of Earned Doctorates is an annual census conducted since 1957 of all individuals receiving a research doctorate from an accredited U.S. institution in a given academic year. The SED is sponsored by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) within the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by three other federal agencies: the National Institutes of Health, Department of Education, and National Endowment for the Humanities. The SED collects information on the doctoral recipient’s educational history, demographic characteristics, and postgraduation plans. Results are used to assess characteristics of the doctoral population and trends in doctoral education and degrees.
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Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2022
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Data highlights, the number of research doctorates conferred by u.s. institutions, which began a sharp 15-month decline in spring 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic, rebounded in 2022 with the highest number of research doctorates awarded in any academic year to date.
Over the past 20 years, most of the growth in the number of doctorates earned by both men and women has been in science and engineering (S&E) fields
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Research Doctorate Conferrals Rebound, Leading to Record Number of U.S. Doctorate Recipients in 2022
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The gap between physics bachelor’s recipients and grad school spots is growing
Students should strategically consider where to apply to graduate school, and faculty members should provide up-to-date job resources so that undergraduates can make informed career decisions.
The number of bachelor’s degrees in physics awarded annually at US institutions is at or near an all-time high—nearly double what it was two decades ago. Yet the number of first-year physics graduate students has grown much more slowly, at only around 1–2% per year. The difference in the growth rates of bachelor’s recipients and graduate spots may be increasing the competition that students face when interested in pursuing graduate study.
With potentially more students applying for a relatively fixed number of first-year graduate openings, students may need to apply to more schools, which would take more time and cost more money. As the graduate school admissions process becomes more competitive, applicants may need even more accomplishments and experiences, such as postbaccalaureate research, to gain acceptance. Such opportunities are not available equally to all students. To read about steps one department has taken to make admissions more equitable, see the July Physics Today article by one of us (Young), Kirsten Tollefson, and Marcos D. Caballero.
We do not view the increasing gap between bachelor’s recipients and graduate spots as necessarily a problem, nor do we believe that all physics majors should be expected to go to graduate school. Rather, we assert that this trend is one that both prospective applicants and those advising them should be aware of so students can make an informed decision about their postgraduation plans.
Gathering the data
For our analysis, we used data from the annual rosters of physics enrollments , which are compiled by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics. (AIP also publishes Physics Today .) We focused on the past two decades, a period when the numbers of awarded bachelor’s degrees and PhDs rebounded from a low in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The data include enrollment and degree statistics at the departmental level and are gathered by sending annual surveys to each US physics department. More than 90% of departments respond during a typical year. To account for large-scale geopolitical and economic events that may introduce short-term fluctuations in the numbers, we computed the three-year average for each count, using the current, previous, and following years.
To determine the overall competitiveness of physics graduate school, we assumed that the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded represents the potential applicant pool and that the number of first-year graduate students in the following fall term represents the number of graduate school spots available to those degree recipients.
Although a recent AIP survey suggests that only about half of physics and astronomy seniors want to attend physics or astronomy graduate school, we used the total number of bachelor’s recipients to account for other potential applicants who are harder to quantify. For example, previous AIP surveys suggest that around 10% of first-year physics graduate students major in something other than physics or astronomy as undergraduates. They also show that 32% of first-year US graduate students wait more than five months after completing their bachelor’s degree to enroll in a graduate program. Other graduate school applicants have already completed a master’s degree or graduate coursework at a different institution.
The overall picture
Comparing the three-year national averages of the number of first-year graduate students and the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded, we find that the potential competition for spots in physics graduate programs has nearly doubled over the past two decades. In 2003 there were 0.67 graduate school spots per undergraduate physics degree (3008 first-year graduate students compared with 4504 bachelor’s degrees awarded). In 2020 there were 0.36 spots (3337 first-year graduate students compared with 9182 bachelor’s degrees awarded).
And opportunities may be even narrower for students from the US. The most recent year of data indicates that around 10% of bachelor’s physics degrees in the US are awarded to international students, whereas around 42% of physics graduate students are international.
To understand what the trend looks like for US students, we scaled the overall trend by the average percentage of US students in physics graduate school over the past two decades (55%) divided by the average percentage of physics bachelor’s degrees earned by US students over that time frame (93.7%). We did this not because graduate schools split their spots into domestic and international ones but rather to acknowledge that a significant fraction of first-year graduate students are not represented in our applicant pool.
Doing so, we find that the number of spots in physics graduate school per US physics bachelor’s degree awarded has dropped from 0.39 in 2003 to 0.21 today. In other words, for every five US undergraduate physics students, there is one graduate school spot available.
Institutional nuances
Looking only at the national picture can obscure the various routes to a graduate physics degree. Accordingly, we also examined how the number of graduate spots per bachelor’s degree has changed over time based on the institution. Even when we broke up the data according to the highest physics degree offered and whether the institution is public or private, the same basic trend of fewer spots per bachelor’s degree holds.
The institutional data do provide insights into how the gap between bachelor’s degree recipients and first-year graduate spots has widened. In the early 2000s, the annual number of students accepted into graduate physics programs at PhD-granting institutions exceeded the number of physics bachelor’s degrees conferred by those schools. Today those institutions accept only a fraction of graduate students per bachelor’s degree that they award. The trend is especially apparent for PhD-granting departments at public institutions, where the number of graduate spots per bachelor’s degree has been cut in half. That’s likely because most of the growth in physics bachelor’s degree recipients has happened at those institutions.
Examining the trend for women
Besides the number of graduate school spots, to whom those spots are going is important too. AIP’s Statistical Research Center provided us with gender data for first-year graduate students, which allowed us to examine the representation of women in the incoming classes of PhD-granting institutions over the past two decades. (Data on race and ethnicity were not available.)
Looking at the three-year averages, we find that the percentage of physics graduate school spots awarded to women has largely followed the trend of physics bachelor’s degrees awarded to women. Until recently, the fraction of women among first-year graduate students hovered around 20%. More recently, however, both the fraction of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women and the fraction of first-year graduate students who are women have been increasing.
Taken together, the results suggest that although women are still underrepresented in physics, the increasingly competitive nature of physics graduate admissions has not resulted in further underrepresentation.
Outlook and implications
The number of graduate students is inherently tied to the amount of departmental funding. With budgets unlikely in the near future to expand enough to allow a dramatic increase in the number of graduate school spots, it is unlikely that these trends will change in the near future on the graduate student side. On the potential applicant side, however, the number of physics bachelor’s degree recipients declined for the first time in nearly two decades for the class of 2021, and the number of junior and senior physics majors is also decreasing, so fewer applicants may vie for those spots in coming years.
The fact that not every person who receives a bachelor's in physics in the US can attend a US graduate school isn’t necessarily a problem, but it should give physics faculty pause. Leaders of undergraduate physics programs should be aware that many of their graduates will not attend graduate school. Departments should develop curriculums that prepare students for alternative paths and provide regular, updated information to their undergraduates to help them make informed career decisions.
Students considering graduate school should be strategic in their choice of applications, balancing the likelihood of acceptance and the time and financial resources needed to apply. Students should also be aware that they may need to apply to graduate school during multiple academic years and consider alternative opportunities in the meantime.
For their part, graduate degree–granting departments need to consider how they allocate the limited number of spots in their programs and whether that process aligns with their equity goals. In particular, departments should take steps to prevent an arms race, in which applicants need better and better CVs to get a spot.
An arms race may at first glance appear to benefit departments. As a result, they may admit students who have extensive research experience, peer-reviewed publications, or a master’s degree. But applicants from marginalized groups or who have had nontraditional paths may not have had the same opportunities as their peers. To work toward their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, departments should evaluate students’ accomplishments in the context of the opportunities available to them, highlighting their potential for graduate success.
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- Published: 08 January 2019
Taking census of physics
- Federico Battiston 1 na1 ,
- Federico Musciotto 1 na1 ,
- Dashun Wang ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7054-2206 2 , 3 ,
- Albert-László Barabási 1 , 4 , 5 ,
- Michael Szell ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3022-2483 1 , 4 , 6 &
- Roberta Sinatra ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7558-1028 1 , 4 , 7 , 8
Nature Reviews Physics volume 1 , pages 89–97 ( 2019 ) Cite this article
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Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional subject areas and how physicists explore them. To map out the evolution of physics subfields, here, we take an intellectual census of physics by studying physicists’ careers. We use a large-scale publication data set, identify the subfields of 135,877 physicists and quantify their heterogeneous birth, growth and migration patterns among research areas. We find that the majority of physicists began their careers in only three subfields, branching out to other areas at later career stages, with different rates and transition times. Furthermore, we analyse the productivity, impact and team sizes across different subfields, finding drastic changes attributable to the recent rise in large-scale collaborations. This detailed, longitudinal census of physics can inform resource allocation policies and provide students, editors and scientists with a broader view of the field’s internal dynamics.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation Grant #61066 (A.-L.B., F.B., R.S. and M.S.), the Intellectual Themes Initiative (ITI) project ‘Just Data’, funded by Central European University (F.M. and R.S.), the National Science Foundation grant SBE 1829344 (D.W.) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research grants FA9550-15-1-0077 (A.-L.B., R.S. and M.S.), FA9550-15-1-0364 (A.-L.B. and R.S.), FA9550-15-1-0162 (D.W.) and FA9550-17-1-0089 (D.W.).
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These authors contributed equally: Federico Battiston, Federico Musciotto
Authors and Affiliations
Department of Network and Data Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Federico Battiston, Federico Musciotto, Albert-László Barabási, Michael Szell & Roberta Sinatra
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Dashun Wang
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Albert-László Barabási, Michael Szell & Roberta Sinatra
Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA
Albert-László Barabási
MTA KRTK Agglomeration and Social Networks Lendulet Research Group, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Michael Szell
Department of Mathematics, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Roberta Sinatra
ISI Foundation, Torino, Italy
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A.-L.B., R.S., M.S. and D.W. conceived the study. All authors designed the research, discussed the results and commented on the manuscript. F.B., F.M. and R.S. developed the methods. F.B. and F.M. analysed the data. M.S. and R.S. directed the research. F.B., F.M., M.S. and R.S. led the writing of the manuscript and A.-L.B. and D.W. edited the manuscript. F.B. and F.M. wrote the supplementary information.
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Battiston, F., Musciotto, F., Wang, D. et al. Taking census of physics. Nat Rev Phys 1 , 89–97 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-018-0005-3
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- Rosario N. Mantegna
Communications Physics (2021)
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The reports below provide campus and academic program-level information on aspects of the student life cycle, ranging from applications and admissions to employment outcomes upon graduation. Use the filters on each page to view data for various years, departments, programs, and objectives.
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- Student Enrollment: Aggregate demographic information for currently enrolled graduate students.
- Time to Degree and Advancement: Provides data on whether students are meeting or exceeding time standards for advancing to candidacy or completing a master’s or doctoral degree ( what is time-to-degree? ).
- Exit Survey: Summary of post-graduation employment plans for doctoral students who submitted an exit survey upon completion of their graduate program (learn more about the Exit Survey here ).
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Admissions | Student Enrollment | Time to Degree and Advancement | Exit Survey
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Physics has been taught at the University of Michigan since the autumn of 1843, under the name of "Natural Philosophy." At the time, the program consisted of eleven college juniors and two faculty members. The Physics Department, understandably, looks a lot different today. Housed in Randall and Homer A. Neal Laboratories on U-M Central Campus, the department's faculty of over fifty professors and lecturers instruct thousands of students a term under a diverse catalog of courses. Our graduate program, typically consisting of about 150 students, is central to the service, education, and community the program provides. Physics PhD students undergo five years of academic and professional training to earn their degree, all while participating on the frontline of new and exciting research.
About Our Students
Rackham Graduate School Doctoral Program Statistics
View this workbook to find more about the Physics graduate program student demographics, admissions, enrollment, funding, milestones, completion rates, and career outcomes.
APS “How does your institution compare?” tool
Use this tool to see how the UM Physics Department compares nationally for both bachelors and doctoral degrees. This tool combines demographics from both the Physics and Applied Physics graduate programs.
We fully recognize that our current gender and racial demographics are influenced by and reflect historical inequities both inside and outside our physics community. While our demographics are comparable to or slightly more equalized than that of the general physics community, we are still far from our goal. To this end, we are constantly working towards making our physics community more accessible, equitable, and inclusive. See our Physics DEI webpage for more information about some of these initiatives.
The above data set categories are influenced by U.S. Census categories. As a result, many marginalized groups are unaccounted for in these data sets. This lack of recognition does not reflect the views of the department as we strive to fully recognize and support all members of our community. Additionally, the definition of underrepresented minorities (URM) is not specified in the Rackham data set, but includes historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in higher education.†
† “Underrepresented minorities” (URM) category: African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians/Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (excluding Asian Americans), and multi-racial (i.e. “two or more races”) students identifying at least one of previously listed URM categories.
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