a bachelor's degree in physics is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #62 out of 363 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 13 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Physics Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 654 bachelor's degrees in physics during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Physics School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of physics for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To take this into account we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on physics students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of physics students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How much debt physics students go into to obtain their bachelor's degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized physics related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physics students working on their bachelor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Physics Bachelor's Degree Schools in New York list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a good decision for students interested in a bachelor's degree in physics. Located in the city of Troy, RPI is a private not-for-profit school with a medium-sized student population.
Physics bachelor's degree recipients from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute get an earnings boost of approximately $14,027 above the typical earnings of physics graduates.
It's hard to beat Cornell University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in physics. Located in the small city of Ithaca, Cornell is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the physics major at Cornell University make $4,612 above the typical college graduate with the same degree shortly after graduation.
Located in the suburb of Rochester, RIT is a private not-for-profit school with a fairly large student population.
Bachelor's recipients from the physics program at Rochester Institute of Technology make $2,053 above the average graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
CCNY is a fairly large public college located in the city of New York.
Bachelor's recipients from the physics program at The City College of New York get $2,587 more than the standard college graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
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).
Your choice of physics for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
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