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  • I really appreciate your effort to gather all these data. I'm surprised to see some of the facts you mentioned and from your link. 1) # of physics bachelor's is only 8k/y. This sounds like physics is one of a few least popular majors among the departments which exist in almost every colleges in the U.S. Maybe media is exaggerating difficulty of physics, and youngsters were discouraged. 2) Acceptance rate of physics programs are much higher than expected (I thought ~5% for top ones). While top math PhD programs enrollment are roughly 20/r, physics
    – Math.StackExchange
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 4:08
  • PhD seems to have more capacity. 3) Some of lower ranked programs have pretty low acceptance rate. Penn state, while it's ranked high, is probably not for me. 4) This may be a well-known fact, but about a half PhD students in math and physics can't get PhD. The following list of universities attended by math PhD students at Harvard and UC Berkeley gave me an idea of how prestige of undergrad institution matters in admission for math PhD (because better education nurtured better students). reddit.com/r/math/comments/296e60/…
    – Math.StackExchange
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 4:12
  • 6
    That only 8,000 bachelor's degrees are awarded to physics students at American universities annually made my eyes pop out. I would have guessed a much larger figure. So a big +1 for presenting hard data.
    – Pete L. Clark
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 5:01
  • 3
    Another point to consider is that people that end up in physics departments come from a variety of backgrounds. I'm a physicist myself but we have plenty of chemists, materials scientists, IT guys and the odd mathematician in my department. I would guess it's mostly only mathematicians trying to make it to maths PhD programs.
    – Miguel
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 6:24
  • 2
    @AranKomatsuzaki Regarding your point 4), I'm guessing that most of the PhD students at top schools can get PhDs. At Caltech in math, almost everyone who started finished, and those who didn't were usually the ones who decided it wasn't for them during their 1st year, so I don't think that's as bleak as it seems. Also, see edit about undergrad institution.
    – Kimball
    Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 12:29