If you pursue a doctor's degree in physics, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #16 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2024 ranking, College Factual looked at 2 schools in Arizona to determine which ones were the best for physics students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 49 doctor's degrees in physics during the 2020-2021 academic year.
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to physics students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physics students want to attend this school to pursue a doctor's degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for physics to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized physics related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physics students working on their doctor's degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Physics Doctor's Degree Schools in Arizona list to help you make the college decision.
Best Schools for Doctorate Students to Study Physics in Arizona
The following list ranks the best colleges and universities for pursuing a doctor's degree in physics.
It's difficult to beat University of Arizona if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in physics. Located in the large city of Tucson, University of Arizona is a public university with a very large student population.
Doctorate graduates who receive their degree from the physics program earn around $88,673 in the first couple years of their career.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).