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 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in North Carolina ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 196 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
The physical sciences doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality physical sciences program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on physical sciences students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other physical sciences 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 physical sciences 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 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.
The physical sciences school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Physical Sciences Doctor's Degree Schools in North Carolina.
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
The physical sciences doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality physical sciences program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
