Timeline for Is admission standard for math PhD significantly higher than that for physics PhD?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 25, 2015 at 15:54 | comment | added | Kimball | (cont'd) One issue I didn't take into account (and I don't know about any such data) is whether students apply to the same number of top grad schools in both math and physics. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 15:54 | comment | added | Kimball | @TomChurch I agree admit rates don't exactly measure the standards for admission, but how do you compare standards in different fields? Things like GRE scores aren't very good indicators of qualifications, but admission rates provide some quantitative measure of how difficult it is to get into a school, so I think it can be considered a crude measure of "relative standards". (Of course there are self selection and prestige factors in the application process, but that happens in both math and physics, possibly at comparable scales.) | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 15:27 | comment | added | Tom Church | I think admit rates at top schools are a bit irrelevant. The number of students we admit at Stanford in math each year is essentially constant. Therefore the admit rate is really just telling you how many students apply. Moreover, our reputation is sufficient that I believe (and hope) that all the students who have a chance of admission are already applying. Therefore the admit rate is really just telling you how many unqualified students apply. | |
| Sep 25, 2015 at 1:57 | history | edited | Kimball | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed grammar
|
| Sep 24, 2015 at 12:29 | comment | added | Kimball | @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. | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 12:28 | history | edited | Kimball | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added paragraph
|
| Sep 24, 2015 at 6:24 | comment | added | Miguel | 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. | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 5:01 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | 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. | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 4:12 | vote | accept | Math.StackExchange | ||
| Sep 24, 2015 at 4:12 | comment | added | Math.StackExchange | 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/… | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 4:08 | comment | added | Math.StackExchange | 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 | |
| Sep 24, 2015 at 3:18 | history | answered | Kimball | CC BY-SA 3.0 |