<p>What are the top schools for Physics? Is Caltech really the best? Where do MIT, Stanford & Berkeley stand?</p>
<p>The problem with trying to rank or discuss top physics colleges is that when it is usually done, people are talking about graduate/Ph.D programs and not the teaching of undergrads. At the graduate level, the ones you list plus UChicago, Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, Yale, and others would all be in the mix at the top. They are also very good for undergrad but there are large numbers of colleges that are just as good at that level and if your goal is to actually learn physics at the undergrad level, you should not limit yourself to looking at any rankings. In fact, a place like Rose-Hulman probably has one of the best programs for actually teaching physics at the undergrad level.</p>
<p>You left out Princeton</p>
<p>To follow up on what Drusba said: Everyone is familiar with the big research universities and the fabulous work going on there---usually being done by professors and graduate students. However, some schools are better than others at providing undergraduate access to high-quality research projects. One way to rate this factor would be to look at the Apker Awards for the last ten years (and I stress---this is only ONE way of looking at it---there are others). The Apker Award is the the highest national award for <em>undergraduate</em> physics research, and each year one is given to a student from a school with a PhD program (basically research universities), and one is given to a student from a school without a PhD program (mostly LACs). Here's how it broke down for the last 10 years, by number of Apkers per school:</p>
<p>Research Universities:<br>
CalTech-2<br>
Princeton-2<br>
U of Florida-2<br>
Chicago-1<br>
MIT-1<br>
Stanford-1<br>
U of Rochester-1</p>
<p>LACs:
Williams College-3
Harvey Mudd-2
Swarthmore-2
Haverford College-1
Illinois State University-1
Middlebury College-1</p>
<p>This makes a lot of sense to me, to an extent. I majored in physics and personally got no obvious benefit from the extensive research program pursued by the grad students there. Other than I had a lot of grad student TAs and graders.</p>
<p>There was a chosen few, who were "better" who did indeed get asked to join a lab group. etc, I believe. But these were the minority.</p>
<p>Maybe it's only the same minority that gets to do the research at the LACs as well, I don't know.</p>