As noted in a previous post, I’m teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I’ll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that’s one of the options, whether people think it’s a good idea or not.
These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly just came out with a new version of theirs, for example), but very few people provide what’s really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let’s see what we can come up with (below the fold)…
I’m not half stupid enough to try to do a detailed ordered ranking of grad programs here. I’m looking for something more general, based on advice I was given when I was applying, lo these many years ago. The basic picture my advisor laid out was of two rough tiers of schools that are worth applying to.
The top tier is a set of schools that are good regardless of field. Pick any subfield you’re interested in, and they’ll have somebody on the faculty who works in that field, and they’ll be among the best in the world.
The exact composition of the second tier varies depending on subfield. These are schools that don’t have the kind of across-the-board excellence you see at the very top places, but are extremely strong in one sub-field or another. They may not have anybody on staff who does string theory, for example, but if you want to study experimental low-energy physics, they’ve got two or three very strong groups. These schools are somewhat easier to get into than the very top places, but if you work in the right field, your degree will be every bit as good as a degree from a better-known school.
The top tier is easy to construct, because everybody knows about those schools, more or less by definition. A rough list would be (in no particular order):
MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago*
(Chicago gets an asterisk because they have a reputation for being very theory-oriented, and not as strong for experimental physics… I’m not sure how justified that is, I’m just saying that’s their reputation.)
The second tier is a little trickier, and the list can be different for different fields. I can construct a rough list for AMO physics, which would look something like this (again, in no particular order):
Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Penn State, Rochester, Rice, UConn, Arizona
A couple of those hover on the edge of moving into the top tier (and a couple have only recently leapt onto this list), but I’m not that knowledgeable about their non-AMO programs. I can back most of these up with the names of a few specific research groups that I would match against anyone at the bigger-name schools. (Almsot anyone, anyway…)
So, here’s the audience participation part: What am I missing? Are there schools that ought to be in the top tier that I’ve left out? Schools I listed on the top level that don’t belong? Solid AMO programs I’m slighting? And who belongs on the second tier for other sub-fields (please be specific)?
(Chicago gets an asterisk because they have a reputation for being very theory-oriented, and not as strong for experimental physics… I’m not sure how justified that is, I’m just saying that’s their reputation.)
That is largely a reflection of your field, I think. Chicago is not big on AMO (when I was there, there wasn’t anybody working in that field), but it’s good for experimental condensed matter and its ilk, high-energy particle physics (does anybody do that any more?), and IIRC observational cosmology (I’m not too sure about that–I never hung out much in the astrophysics part of things).
I’m actually going to advocate William and Mary as a second-tier Nuclear school. I’m not actually in the field myself, but we’re 20 miles from Jefferson Lab, and have a hand (and a grad student) in just about every experiment there.
I actually couldn’t put together a list for HEP, my experience is limited to my experiment, which is comprised heavily of Minnesota-ans and Oxford-ites.
Specifically for Astronomy, I’d include in the top tier or top-and-a-half tier:
U. of Arizona, UC Santa Cruz, Ohio State, U. Wisconsin
Most of the top tier physics ones are good too– Caltech, Berkeley, Harvard are probably the top three, although MIT is certainly way up there. Princeton may be more astroawesome than I had thought, given that they’ve recently hired Alice Shapley (whom I know and respect).
Second-tier astronomy-type schools:
UC Santa Cruz (I know, I’m flaky), UCLA, U. Washington, John Hopkins, U. Maryland, Texas @ Austin
I am probably forgetting something. All of those second-tier schools are still excellent.
It will be mixed whether you should go into the physics dept. or the astronomy dept. if you want to do astrostuff.
And, of course, as usual, there is the whole issue of figuring out things like where you will feel comfortable, where there is somebody you want to work with (or, more realistically, a number of people you’d be happy to work with), and so forth.
-Rob
Concur with Pam on Chicago’s strengths. There’s still only about two faculty members doing AMO here. Definitely top tier experimentalists for astro, HEP and condensed matter. In fact for astro and HEP I would say Chicago is relatively stronger on the experimental side. For condensed matter it is outstanding on both fronts. For some reason Chicago seems to have a reputation for being “theoretical” for all academic disciplines, not just physics.
I’m curious where UCSB fits in all of this? My impression is that they are ascending into the ranks of top teir physics institutes rather quickly.
I’m not really up on this sort of thing, but the places that came to mind for me that weren’t mentioned were Cornell, UIUC and UCSB.
Chicago is a great place if you want to do cosmology.
I think that UCSB is turning into a great place particularly for high-energy theory.
Cornell is solid all around, physics and astronomy.
-Rob
Urbana and Cornell are top tier in condensed matter experiment, but often excluded from top lists in other disciplines, perhaps due to isolation?
Colorado is top in AMO, Rochester in optics, UCSB in theory – not just high energy, but cond matter too. They have some really good groups in experiment as well.
Penn State, UMass Amherst and GA Tech are among underrated schools that deserve to be ranked way higher than they are, at least in experimental cond. matter.
I know I might offend people with this statement, but I think schools like Brown, Columbia and Yale are a bit on overrated side, due to their ivy league stature. Caltech is not well-represented in all fields.
I noticed from CM-AMO rumor pages that Berkeley and Urbana had troubles attracting top candidates. The first two offers that they made were declined. MIT was rejected in their first offer too and decided to hire from within. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but I would have expected those schools to be able to hire almost anyone they want in CM-AMO.
Rob,
I may be a bit biased (PhD ’04), but IMHO you were correct in putting UCSC in the top tier of astro schools, and therefore incorrect in putting it in the second tier. 🙂 I can’t think of any sub-field of astronomy for which Santa Cruz does not have at least one top-notch faculty member. The only schools which might be better are Caltech, Berkeley, and Arizona.
Second tier astronomy: add Columbia (radio astronomy). Though I’m not sure I’d recommend it to graduate students due to the heavy teaching load.
Since this is officially a physics department thread, I know the UCSC physics dept. is quite good at some things (thus a second tier school by Chad’s scheme). The people I knew were the cosmology and N-body simulation folks, naturally, but there may well be other specialties worth mentioning.
Another point about ranking graduate schools – in my experience a location which the student finds tolerable to live in is more important than the quality of the program. I happen to have transferred from a second tier school to a first tier school when I was a grad student, but would not have hesitated at all if the institutional strengths were reversed.
Since this is officially a physics department thread,
I’m trying to get a bunch of other work done, so I haven’t been actively commenting, but I want to jump in here to note that I’m currently in a Department of Physics and Astronomy, and several of the majors I’ll be dealing with this fall are more interested in the Astronomy side of things. Thus, rankings for Astronomy grad schools are useful to me as well.
I’ll have more comments later, but I need to get back to re-formatting my CV for my tenure review. Whee!
And, of course, as usual, there is the whole issue of figuring out things like where you will feel comfortable, where there is somebody you want to work with (or, more realistically, a number of people you’d be happy to work with), and so forth.
This is an absolutely crucial point. The choice of graduate advisor is probably even more important than the school, at least if you’re planning to stay in research in that field. And if you pick an advisor you can’t get along with, your life will be absolute hell, no matter how good the overall school is.
That will absolutely be a part of my how-to-pick-a-grad-school spiel this fall.
A couple of comments on other things:
Re: Chicago, like I said, I’m just reporting what I recall hearing. I don’t actually know that much about the University of Chicago, other than that it’s in a charming neighborhood, and their tenure decisions stink.
I almost listed UCSB in the top tier, but I have to admit, I’m a little foggy on U-Cal schools other than Berkeley and UCLA. I wasn’t entirely sure I was thinking of the right place.
Cornell isn’t really on the radar in AMO (at least, not my radar), which is why I didn’t think of them, despite growing up near there. Illinois was another oversight.
Thanks for the additions and corrections. More information is always welcome.
For high-energy theory, what Aaron Bergman said, plus Rutgers. For strings, at least, Rutgers and UCSB are almost as good as the very top schools. Also, for collider-oriented theory, Wisconsin is world-class, and for nuclear theory, Washington is very good.
UPenn (the University of Pennsylvania, which is an ivy, as opposed to Penn State, which is not) is probably one of the best schools to go to for condensed matter physics, and strikes me as being somewhere between your first tier and second tier schools.
I can only offer rumors and hersey based on my experience at CDF (which is limited).
Big 10 schools have a relatively high profile on CDF. The large number of students/postdocs/faculty allows them to have their hands in a lot of important projects. Michigan, Ohio State, UIUC, U. Penn (not big 10, but still a big contributor), Michigan State (they’re actually D0) — all of these places have big roles in the experiment. An example of a smaller school with an excellent CDF group is Rochester. Again, it’s my impression that numbers have a lot to do with how strong these schools are. I imagine their roles in ATLAS/CMS will be similar.
I actually think number of facutly at an institution should be considered an advantage in most cases. An important part of grad school is finiding an advisor who you can work with. In a bigger department you have more choices.
It’s going to be an interesting time to apply to grad school for HEP. The LHC will soon be the only place in the world to do high energy experiment. Departments across the country are going to start looking uniform — “We have X faculty on CMS, Y on ATLAS, and that’s it”.
Here are some other links:
A critique of U.S. News rankings
phds.org, a place where you can learn about grad schools. The data is old but it lets you generate your own rankings.