Analysis of the institutional free market in accredited medical physics graduate programs

Abstract

Medical Physics education is largely delivered through accredited programs where admission numbers and funding for students are controlled by the individual institutions providing the educational programs. Public data from these accredited graduate programs, along with funding data, can be used to analyze institutionally driven trends in the market for providing this education. 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 ratio is 2:1 in MS:PhD for total annual graduates in North America. Trends in funding show self-funding of MS students is a dominant pathway in domestic programs, with this being less dominant in international 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 recent rise in NCI funding in the last 5 years. This can be contrasted to a substantial 5X–6X rise in NIH funding for engineering research programs during 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 has missed the growth trend of NIH funding to non-accredited programs such as biomedical engineering.