Considering that minorities are overrepresented in the lower income brackets as compared to their overall percentage in the population, we may be hitting on one reason that they are underrepresented in physics. Your advice is great for the middle class, which was definately overrepresented in all my college experiences. What can people who don’t have that advantage do?

Many places will use freshman and sophomore courses in physics and math as their “weedout” courses, where their intent is to flunk out and eliminate as many engineering and science majors as possible. (I suppose most majors will have their own set of “weedout” courses). I’ve known many physics and math majors who really hated freshman physics and math courses, for this very reason.

This is contrary to the evidence I see as faculty at an STS: Many of our best graduate students, and many of our best recent graduates, did not have access to grad courses as undergrads. They take a few extra courses at the beginning, get a good research program going; life goes on. The lack of grad courses in their undergrad years is completely irrelevant.

In my day very basic physics such as quantum field theory and general relativity were only available in graduate courses. A huge fraction of my course load during my junior and senior years were grad courses.

Because there is no benefit in arriving at a decent grad school without this basic knowledge, I would rule out any undergrad schools (typically LACs and the more bureaucratic LSSs) that don’t offer grad courses.

Would be really helpful to some of us I’m sure.

http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/area33.html

Of course, what you care about is what life is like as an undergrad, not how good the research is; but that’s much harder to quantify. You really have to visit the schools and see for yourself. Talking to other students is by far the best gauge, but you need to talk to several and average over the individual inclinations (or, even better, find someone whose inclinations match with yours).

That said, schools with the top physics grad programs can be relied on to prepare undergraduates for their own grad programs. For liberal arts colleges, look at the size of the physics faculty and the number of physics majors. There is a feedback loop, where liberal arts faculty send their best undergrads to and hire new faculty from their own graduate alma maters. So check where the faculty got their graduate degrees from.

The top part of the top tier of physics graduate programs are, roughly in geographic order: Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Illinois, Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, MIT. Also in the top tier are UCLA, UCSB, Texas, Michigan, Maryland and probably a few others depending on one’s criteria.