Brasil Final Report - Department of Physics - The Ohio State University

51
CHANGES IN UNDERGRADUATE PHYSICS IN THE UNITED STATES
Ruth H. Howes
Ball State University
Department of Physics and Astronomy
47306 – Muncie – IN USA
rhowes@bsu.edu
Undergraduate physics departments in the United States operate in a rapidly changing
environment over which individual departments have little control. This new environment presents
both challenges and opportunities. Departments that respond creatively and constructively to these
changes will thrive in the 21st century. Those that continue business as usual will decline just as
classics departments declined when Latin was no longer the language of educated men and women.
The number of bachelor's degrees in physics has plummeted to pre-Sputnik levels in spite of
the doubling of the total number of bachelor's degrees granted. There are 762 colleges and
universities in the U.S. which offer bachelor's degrees in physics. Sixty seven percent of them offer
only the first degree; nine percent offer a master's degree in physics; and twenty four percent offer
the Ph.D. In 1998, the median number of undergraduate physics bachelor's granted by Ph.D.
institutions was seven, and for bachelor's only institutions, it was three. Sixty-three percent of BSgranting
institutions and twenty-six percent of Ph.D.-granting institutions produced fewer than
three undergraduate physics graduates, and many produced none at all. Deans have begun to notice
that many physics departments have more faculty than undergraduate majors.
Physics departments have never produced large numbers of majors compared to departments
like journalism or history. However, other disciplines, notably engineering and medicine, require
physics courses, and most physics departments teach large numbers of students from other majors.
Enrollments in these service courses are currently holding, however, new accreditation standards for
engineering schools are being implemented. These new standards base accreditation not on specific
courses required of students but on the performance of students who graduate. Thus engineering
students still need a good understanding of basic physics, but they are not required to enroll in a
year of calculus-based physics taught in a physics department. Engineering schools are demanding
more responsive physics courses for their students with the threat of teaching physics themselves.
In addition to service teaching, large physics departments with few undergraduate majors
have survived because they brought in large research grants with associated indirect costs that could
support faculty and university infrastructure. If you remove the National Institutes of Health from
consideration, funding for non-defense research and development in the U.S. has declined by six
percent over the last six years. Physics has been particularly hard hit since many basic projects
were funded by the military where funding for basic research has also experienced cuts. More and
more physics faculty members are competing for less federal money.
These symptoms have forced physics departments to consider the environment in which
they operate today. First, physics, as a discipline is changing. Just after World War II, physics
was the nucleus about which other sciences orbited. Today, it is one of the atoms making up the
complex molecule of interrelated scientific disciplines. Increasingly, state-of-the-art physics
research requires large teams from several institutions. Many physicists travel to large user facilities
instead of working in university laboratories.