a doctor's degree in physical sciences is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #7 out of 36 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 3 schools in the Rocky Mountains Region to determine which ones were the best for physical sciences students pursuing a doctor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 310 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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their doctor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their doctor'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 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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for physical sciences students working on their doctor's degree.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
