Who monitors the offering of RA doctorates?

Scaredrain's post about Capella's new programs brought this question to mind:

Who makes the decision on the validity of new RA graduate degree programs? Does a school have to run those decisions through the accrediting body? I pose this question because there are so many diverse forms of doctorate becoming available that I begin to wonder if anyone controls that sort of thing. Would a RA school have to option of creating a frivolous degree just to meet a public demand and be able to do so without raising the ire of accreditors? For this reason, is it possible that some of the new RA degree offerings are not scholarly? (Please note that this is not a comment on the programs offered by Capella, which is IMO a fine school)

 

I work full time for a large for profit online university, and while we do not have doctorates (not yet anyways), the process to offer a new program goes through an extensive process, that normally comes down to what is in demand currently and what their competitors offer. After the market research comes back and if its favorable then the degree structure and courses are created. After getting approval through may review boards within the university, our accreditor (The Higher Learning Commission), approves any new degree program once the university has proven that the course outcomes and objectives match the lectures and assessments. It normally takes about a year for the entire process to go through the university and through the accrediting body. I have seen the process done quicker for another university.

 

Our process is very much like scaredrain's. We do a needs analysis and market research study, including potnetial demand for the degree and employability of graduates. The degree is then reviewed by academic leaders and approved by our Board of Trustees. We must then receive approval by our state board of higher education and from our regional accediting agency (SACS). We are currently in this process for a PhD in Management with three concentrations (strategic management, conflict management and information technology management). We are awaiting word from SACS (unfortunately, they are a bit behind on processing requests).

 

Do I understand correctly that you do research into whether or not a graduate with a given degree from your school will be able to obtain employment in his/her field of study? If so, that's much more conscientious than I had assumed. Do you think that most RA schools go to that much trouble?

 

That might be why AMU hasn't rolled out a PhD in History yet. There is no marketability for B&M PhD's in History, let alone an online for-profit one.

 

Funny you should ask... I thought we were supposed to be doing that.

 

The non-profit state and private RA schools in which I have worked usually do a needs analysis, but nothing like the kind of employment analysis that my institution does.

To be fair, I must acknowledge that the missions of the two types of institutions are different. The comprehensive non-profit universities offered a broad range of fields of study. Many of these (e.g. "area studies" programs)are driven more by the expertise and preferences of faculty, than by the employability of program graduates. If it were not for this situation, those interested in studying medieval history, European literature, women's studies, etc. would have far fewer choices of places to study.

An institution like mine has a primary goal of preparing people to enter or advance in their chosen career. My institution is required to report to our state the number of our students who achieve employment after graduation (my non-profit institutions did not have to do this). This is why our local non-profit private university offers majors in philosophy and media/cultural studies and our local state university offers majors in pan-African studies and foreign literature, while we do not. We offer human resource leadership, conflict management, logistics and culinary arts and they do not.

One of the great things about U.S. higher education is that there are over 4,000 institutions and thousands of majors and emphases from which to choose.

 

In the U.S. we have a flexible human capital market. This means employees have great flexibility in making their career growth choices. With this flexibility comes great risk, however. It's nice to know some schools do needs analyses, but individual students need to do so as well.

I recently saw an advertisement for a local university where it was pitching its degree programs in homeland security. I'm not so sure that DHS, for example, is looking for these future graduates. It sounds good in a 30-second ad, but I'm not confident the needs analysis has taken place. Caveat emptor.

As a very young man I worked for awhile as a financial aid director of a campus of a trade school. What a rip-off. We were in the business of offering little more (less, really) than could be obtained at a community college. Are main market was the unemployed, who could qualify for the maximum Pell Grant. Our tuition was slightly higher than that. The result: a lot of bucks, but not a lot of jobs. People paying the modern day equivalent of $3,600 to learn "medical assistant" and "office assistant." Geez....

 

"Caveat emptor," as Rich points out, is a necessity for those considering any post-secondary education. Unfortunately, there are plenty of schools like the one that he describes.

While I make it a point not to shill for my own university (which is why I do not put it in my signature), an institution focused on preparing students for careers, needs to have a mechanism to find jobs related to the students' degrees (not just entry-level positions that you can get off the street) and help place them into these positions. While many of our students are already employed, our career services department succeeds in placing 99% of those who choose to utilize it. An career-oriented institution that takes "a lot of bucks" but does not produce "a lot of jobs" is falling down on its primary mission.

 

"Our."

Ouch.

 

One of my favorite quotes from a dean at UF, "We are a liberal arts college. We don't care if students get jobs."

 

That is a great quote! LOL

 

This was probably an unaccredited or possibly a regionally accredited program, is that correct? Do you think RA schools would not have the option of pulling this kind of thing off?

 

If my institution did, we'd be quickly out of business.

 

The accreditors do review new doctoral (and other degree) programs before a school offers them. Those approvals are usually included mong the 'substantive changes' that the accreditors sign off on at each accreditation meeting. Other changes might be new branch campuses and things like that.

But more generally, and perhaps more importantly, I think that the market makes its own informal decisions on the value of individual doctoral programs. In the case of doctorates the market typically consists of the rest of the academic world along with the kind of extra-academic employers who have a need for people with highly advanced educations. The significant variable is the program's reputation in those relevant communities, academic and professional. This is how some programs come to be highly prestigious while others just bump along the bottom and it's why some programs' graduates have an easier time finding employment.

That might depend on what you mean by "frivolous". There are already many doctoral programs offered in what some people might consider unworthy subjects. (Religions that they don't happen to believe in, trendy politicized subjects in the humanities, some alternative medical subjects and so on.) I don't think that the regional accreditors pay very much attention to the subject matter of degree programs as long as they fit into the existing model and structural format for that particular degree.

That raises the possibility of another kind of 'frivolous' in which it isn't the subject matter that's beyond the pale, but rather admission requirements, number of required units, syllabi, teaching, labs and practical experiences, exam and dissertation expectations and similar things that are being simplified and minimized. A few of the DL programs (including non-profit ones) flirt with this kind of frivolity since they market advanced degrees like a mass-market commercial product, competing on the basis of speed, ease and convenience.

Of course. Minimally scholarly at least. I think that they do have to meet their accreditor's minimum expectations in order to be accredited, but some of them don't aspire to much more than being able to market RA doctorates. So they try to get by as easily as possible and never try very hard to generate a scholarly reputation.

 

Can you name some schools that fit into this low category? I'm worried that NCU, the school I'm attending, might be in that category. It's pretty tough, much tougher than my master's, but I don't have any doctoral experience to compare it to. So I really don't know.

 

Although there are some that will discount an entire institution based on some students' complaints or even less reliable informaiton, the fact is that this is very difficult to do, since most colleges and universities have some programs that are notably stronger or weaker than others.

Nova Southeastern U. (an institution for which I have no affiliation) has had many positive and negative things said about it on Degreeinfo. I can say that its graduate program in Instructional Technology and Distance Education is one of the most scholarly productive in the country. Two journals are edited out of that department and several journal articles and books have been published by NSU ITDE faculty.

Northcentral is still pretty new and does not have that many grads out there (compared to other institutions), so it has not had the opportunity to develop much of a reputation. I do not see much scholarship coming out of NCU at this time. Those NCU students that I know have told me that it uses an independent study methodology, rather than interactive online learning. I do not know the level of dissertations produced by NCU.

 

Thanks, Dr. P. Your input is of great value to me and to this board in general!

 

Hi Michael. I'm a little uncomfortable trashing schools, particularly ones that friends on the board might be attending, so I'll steer clear of that. (I did my DL masters at a 'fourth tier' school myself. Of course it was for personal interest, so I wasn't worried about its relative position in the academic pecking order.)

I've never studied NCU very closely because it doesn't offer my subjects, so I'm not very familiar with it. I haven't seen anything that particularly impressed me, but that doesn't necessarily mean that nothing's there.

Maybe you can answer your question yourself. Ask yourself whether there is anything about NCU's academics or intellectual life that you find especially cool or exciting. Does anything that's happening there seem important somehow or grab your imagination? Could you talk up your school if you had to?

Does NCU sponsor any organized projects, institutes or research activities? Are NCU professors actively publishing? If so, what kind of things are they working on? (Does the school have a stable faculty or a fluid crew of adjuncts?) If something interests you, is it possible to contact a faculty member, introduce yourself and maybe get yourself involved? You will achieve least two important things, getting research experience (and conceivably even some publication credits), and cultivating future academic job references who can recommend you.

At some of these independent study schools, it's very important that students actively take the initiative. Professors probably won't initiate any contact with you beyond returning your papers.

But once again, I haven't followed NCU very closely and can't say a whole lot about it.