Physical Sciences is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #7 most popular doctor's degree program in the country. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
College Factual looked at 4 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Massachusetts ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 389 doctor's degrees in physical sciences during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Physical Sciences School for Your Doctor's Degree
Your choice of physical sciences for getting your doctor'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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host 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 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
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to physical sciences students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of physical sciences students who choose to seek a doctor'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 physical sciences students go into to obtain their doctor'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 physical sciences related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for physical sciences students working on their doctor'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 Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in Massachusetts list, to help you choose the best school for you.
Any student pursuing a degree in a doctor's degree in physical sciences needs to look into Boston College. Located in the small city of Chestnut Hill, Boston College is a private not-for-profit college with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in physical sciences from Boston College
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).
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of physical sciences for getting your doctor'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.
