Dutch physics education is world-class, an external reviewing committee concluded last fall in a report on the Netherlands’ nine university programs in physics, applied physics, and astronomy. For more than a decade, however, the country has seen falling physics enrollments, and many of the committee’s recommendations are aimed at reversing that trend.
Among the recommendations are that each physics department focus on specific research areas, and that students be encouraged to move to the university that is strongest in their preferred subfield. “You cannot have nine MITs. So we strongly emphasized that not all universities can be first in everything, but that they can build niches,” says Jan Sengers, the University of Maryland, College Park, physicist who chaired the committee, which looked at pre-PhD university education. Such reviews are undertaken every five years in the Netherlands, but the appointment of committee members from abroad is new. “The point was to...
