Analysis of the Institutional Free Market in Accredited Medical Physics Graduate Programs

Abstract

Medical Physics education is delivered through accredited programs with admissions and funding for students determined by individual institutions providing the educational experiences. Public data from accredited graduate programs, along with funding data, were used to analyze institutional trends in this educational market. Temporal trends from 2017 to 2023 show robust growth in MS graduates, increasing at an average of 17.7 per year, as compared to steady but modest growth in PhDs, increasing by 3.6 per year. The current status is there are nearly two MS graduates for every PhD graduate. Trends in funding show self-funding of students is a dominant pathway in domestic programs. Those programs dominated by accredited MS education have their largest fraction of faculty in radiation oncology departments, whereas those dominated by PhD education have their largest fraction of faculty in radiology departments. Overall NIH funding in the space of radiation diagnostics and therapeutics has been largely static over this timeframe, but with a notable 5 year rise in NCI funding. This can be contrasted to a substantial 5X-6X rise in NIH funding for engineering research in this same period, with significant increases in trainee funding there. Taken as a whole, this survey shows that growth in the field of medical physics education is dominated by MS graduates, presumably servicing the expanded growth needs for well-trained clinical physicists. However, the research infrastructure that supports PhD training in medical physics seems likely to be growing modestly and missing the growth trend of NIH funding that appears to show substantially more growth in non-accredited programs such as biomedical engineering. This data is useful to informing accreditation guidance on numbers of graduates to match the workforce needs or for inter-institutional planning around education goals.