In this plot the top schools are at the bottom.  One can see that all the poorly ranked physics departments  have relatively
small physics faculties but the top ranked departments span a large range in size from 16 to 73.   Thus it is not impossible for a small department to achieve high rank.

The NRC rankings are basically a poll of representative physics faculty members asked to gauge the quality of a graduate program.   Only the list of faculty in a department was provided although correspondents were free to use other information if they wished.

The plot includes all departments with rank better than 134 except for Akron, Stevens Tech, and Rhode Island whose data on faculty numbers and research profiles were not available.

If you are interested in how the NRC rankings correlate with the research profile of a department click here . It is also possible to quantitatively understand the NRC quality ratings.

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