Re: where have all the physics-loving students gone, long time passing?

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 10:45 AM 1/6/00 -0500, Richard W. Tarara wrote:
> All of this is not to say that there are _no_ students
> really turned on by learning (I get a few--far too few) and that some will
> take courses to really try and learn something they are interested in
> (outside their major)--but that is VERY seldom physics.

And then as part of our search for an explanation thereof, at 10:41 AM
1/7/00 -0500, Richard W. Tarara wrote:
> there is no physics major here.

...

> I think I
> can safely say that there are a LOT more schools like
> ours than like MIT and Cal Tech..  ;-(

Well, that raises some interesting questions.

For starters, let's leave MIT and Caltech out of the discussion.  They are
rather extreme cases.  Let's consider the softer conjecture that there are
more schools that don't offer physics electives than schools that do.

If we weight all schools equally, I'm pretty sure this conjecture
holds.  There are LOTS and LOTS of small schools, and most of them don't
offer physics majors.  Take a look at e.g.
  http://neasc.org/pssma.htm
and follow a few of the links if you're curious.


OTOH it may be more informative to weight *students* equally, i.e. to
weight schools in proportion to the number of students.

Hypothesis #1:  Using the per-student measure, I conjecture that the
typical *student* has a fair chance of attending a school that offers a
physics major and physics electives.

I tried without success to find some data to support and quantify this
hypothesis.  It may be that I am severely biased in this area.  Presumably
nearly everyone on this list attended a school that offered a physics major
-- but that may not be representative of the general population.

------

Hypothesis #2:  No matter how few or how many physics-loving students there
are in the general population, you will see disproportionately few of them
if you teach at a school that doesn't offer physics electives.

This second hypothesis is supported by the following arguments:
  1a) College applicants, if they are smart, want to keep their options open.
  1b) They know before they apply whether or not the school offers physics
electives.
  1c) Therefore students who are entertaining even the possibility of
being interested in physics won't be seen in the student body or even in
the applicant pool.
  2) Any who slip through that self-selection filter will be discouraged
by the lack of role models and other chicken-and-egg effects.