  We report on the temporal changes in undergraduate-level physics programs at
Korean universities from 1915 to 2023 by analyzing data on physics-related
departments and their students using basic statistics and the scaling theory of
statistical physics. Our analysis reveals that the number of departments peaked
around the turn of the 21st century, and it has been steadily decreasing ever
since, with particularly severe declines in private universities located
outside the capital region. Besides the change in the overall numbers, we also
show the change in the self-identity of physics-related departments reflected
in department names, which reveals a recent trend of emphasizing more
application-side such as semiconductors and data. As a sophisticated measure to
quantify regional imbalances relative to the population eligible for higher
education, we present scaling exponents from the scaling theory, which shows a
shift from sublinear to linear for departments and a shift from linear to
superlinear for students. The result indicates the exacerbation of the regional
imbalance of university-level physics education in Korea.
