PER PhDs & Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded: Part 2

About 18 months ago, we reported on an apparent connection between physics education research (PER) PhD programs and physics bachelor’s degree production in this column¹; after further discussions with the editor we return now to this topic to probe it a little further. At that time, we looked at how the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded per full-time-equivalent faculty member (FTE), a variable that we’ll call BF here, changed over a specified time window. We compared departments that had a documented PER PhD specialization (using GradSchoolShopper.com) to those that did not. We scaled the bachelor’s degree data by dividing by FTE (giving the value of BF) because the departments with PER programs generally produced more bachelor’s degrees than those without a PER program. At that time, we used a simple statistical test to compare the means and found evidence to support the hypothesis that departments with a...