DETC Doctorate Pilot

I thought you fellow Air Forcers(myself included) might disregard that guy as a military instructor. I thought not to put him in...as I found a few others, too, who were not military instructors.

Nonetheless, the rest appear to be regular faculty/teachers not appointed by the military...with a DETC master's.

 

Yeah, but they teach in vocational programs, where a master's usually isn't required. But for those examples of master's-qualified instructors teaching in academic programs with degrees from DETC-accredited schools, good for them!

 

doctorate utility in industry

In my industry the doctorate is king. I am in the pharm business and they mainly look to PhD chemists, DVM's, MD's, PharmD's, and the like to hire. It's hardcore research. There is a reason you would hire those types in this industry...they did research at university level.

While it may not make as much sense to have doctorates for IT, HR, and Finanace folk, the thinking prevails that it is best to have a doctorate in these areas. Why? Well, the simplest explanation is that these same scientists and physicians like to pal with those like them. They like to hire those like them...doctorate holders.

As these scientists and physicians move up the ladder from the labs to the meeting rooms, they become managers, directors, and officers. They bring in doctorates in all fields because that's what they have and can relate to that type of person. Thus, a Chemist may become a CIO. The CIO looks to other doctorates to bring up the chain, too.

Not only that, we work with a lot of universities. They respect the Dr. title and believe you me...there is a lot of thinking in the university system that non-doctors are lower caste(having done a good deal of work with the likes of Purdue, Illinois, Chicago, and Duke). My company deals with universities at many levels all day long. They like giving doctors the jobs of interacting with other doctors at schools.

Personally, I find that the PhD types I work with are very bright and can do an excellent job. No worse no better than anyone else with just a BS or MS. Many of the PhD types just got tired of university and came into industry. I see it all the time. I see the opposite, too. Some of the PhD's go back to university after their stint in industry.

 

I am curious what pay scale they work from. Does their DETC degree qualify them to be paid at the masters level? Will a community college instructor with a RA masters and a DETC doctorate get paid at the masters or doctoral level?

 

Our limited experience here suggests that they are paid at the lower level (when the school is aware of the difference).




Tom Nixon

 

What experiences here suggest this, Tom? Did someone say they get paid less because of their DETC degree? I'd like to take a look at some of the threads that revolved around this pay discussion if it was on the forum previously.

Sounds like a poll question maybe.

Thanks, Bing

 

Dunno. Any schools out there pay some of their profs less because their doc was from Freindly Neighborhood State University vs. Prestigious Ivy Grad School? (Insert tongue-in-cheek smiley.) My point being, most employers dislike having to make qualitatitative decisions re employee compensation because quantitative decisions are so much easier.

 

We didn't make that distinction at UoP--all doctorate-holders received the same rate of pay. Holders of doctorates from DETC-accredited school were not recognized, and master's-qualified instructors with their master's from a DETC-accredited school would not be accepted to teach at all.

 

It just occurred to me.

One thing that will have a considerable effect on the acceptability of DETC doctorates will be whether UMI accepts their dissertations. Why? Because when doing routine literature reviews, UMI is one of THE places to go for the most recent work. If DETC dissertations start showing up in research journals, either on their own or as reviewed literature, they, and their authors, will be in the research mainstream.

UNLESS, of course, the quality of the work is so poor as to give DETC programs a black eye!

 

I guess the quality remains to be seen for the DETC dissertations...if they have them. Or...the projects associated with them...which won't show up in UMI(depending on how the doctorate works out....DBA vs. PhD). I think CSU is doing the DBA right?

You know, the DETC might do well to have a DTech degree program, like the technikons, rather than a PhD...since so many of their grads teach in what some might consider vocational type programs. I could see DETC schools doing a DTech, EdD or DBA.

 

CSU will do the DBA.

DETC will not accredit Ph.D. programs.

DETC will accredit schools to offer practitioner-related degree programs like the ones you mention.

A DTech would seem within that scope. However, I don't know how marketable such a degree title would be, given that is uncommon in the U.S. (Does any U.S. school offer one?)

 

I don't imagine that DETC dissertations will be poor quality. It appears that they're being very careful to make sure that it doesn't happen.

The UMI point is very good and interesting. They used to accept unaccredited dissertations. I assume that they stopped because of pressure from somewhere. Probably they wanted to improve their reputation to get more foreign schools to automatically include their dissertations? They may also have been concerned about improving their trustworthiness as a search tool? I suspect that DETC will be very concerned about this issue as well. A most interesting external gauge for measuring acceptability, kudos!

 

Oh! I thought that the DETC "Professional Doctorates" WOULD require a dissertation of publishable quality but not necessarily containing a "significant ORIGINAL contribution" and not necessarily requiring an oral defense. This is pretty much the Australian J.S.D. model, IIUC.

I had thought that UMI used to accept dissertations from unaccredited schools but that they weren't listed as "dissertations" but made available as some sort of "other writings"? Not so?

 

I once watched an interview conducted by a small biotech firm in Silicon Valley.

They had an interesting oncology agent that killed cancer cells like a champ in-vitro. But they were having serious problems with a) production scale-up (the agent was very hard to synthesize and even different laboratory batches didn't have the same chemical consistency), and b) making it work in-vivo. (They were in animal trials and were experiencing drug delivery problems and the fact that the agent denatured too quickly.)

The product was promising enough to have generated significant seed money from a big-pharma firm. But it wasn't clear at that point if it would ever result in a practical treatment for human cancer. The little company was seeking Ph.D.-level researchers to help address their problems.

The interviews were conducted by the research director, himself a Ph.D. scientist. The interviews were informal, but conducted at a pretty high technical level. Nothing proprietary was given away, but the general problems (not unusual ones in the biotech world) were described and the candidate's comments solicited. The interviewer was interested in the kind of work that the candidate had previously done, who he had worked with, what kind of problems his former research group had been concerned with, and so on. Accreditation was never mentioned at any time. Of course the interviewer already knew where the candidate had done his doctoral work and already knew the department's reputation.

My question is: Could a DETC doctor walk into that kind of hiring situation and have any chance of success at all? I don't think so, frankly.

Long ago when I was a student there, San Francisco State was trying to fill a full-time faculty slot in my department. The search was conducted nationally, and people flew in from all over to interview and to deliver test lectures. (That provided us students with a great guest lecture series.) Considerable attention was paid to what the candidate's specialty was, since he or she was being hired to teach particular classes. The school hoped to land somebody as prominent as possible in order to raise the department's profile.

Again, I'm not sure how viable a DETC doctor would be.

The thing is that in neither of these cases does that unviability have anything directly to do with the accreditor being DETC. Nor is the DL issue particularly relevant either.

My point is simple, I guess: If DETC and ACICS hope to crash the research-university club, then they probably have to think about hosting some research. If they are going to be generating scholars, then they probably need to give some thought to scholarship.

But this business of choosing schools with little or no scholarly or research histories as doctoral pilots, and then suggesting that the resulting degrees be taken seriously because of 'high DETC standards' or 'dept of education recognition', probably isn't gonna work. The RA, scholarly and professional worlds will perceive these things as substandard, and the predictable howls of "discrimination!" and "elitism!" and "RA or no way!" will be raised in response.

If people are going to insist on being players, then they have to be willing to play the game.

 

It's a good point, Bill. I would say the same applies to PhD's from NCU, Touro, and even UofP. All RA but how much money are they spending on research. First, you have to get grant specialists to find you the money, though, to even do research.

I very much doubt that any of the distance programs, RA or otherwise, can produce people to pass the inteview at the biotech you describe. That will take having had a good deal of research experience in a regular university in my opinion.

Personally, I think that the DETC doctors are the types that would do well in schools just teaching subjects they have skill in...meaning plenty of industry experience behind them. Not to say they don't have research skills, though. Plenty say that, "oh you don't need but a Masters for that." OK. But, the doctorate will give them other things they may not already have with a Masters...research experience, advanced study, writing a contribution to the field, etc.

By the way, the brightest and best performing, manager I ever saw has no college education. Al self taught person and worked her way up through the ranks by being the best at whatever she tried.

 

BillDayson:

Every higher level position in a government agency that I have ever been hired for or did the hiring for will filled in the way you describe.

Credentials are necessary to screen applicants and winnow out the obviously unqualified. After that, employers are looking for SOLUTIONS.

I don't know, of course, but I am INCLINED to think that a DETC J.S.D. might be able to offer systems and solutions to, say, a State Court system of the sort I have in mind. Furthermore, no one else seems to be able to do a decent job of it, at least not to this point in time. The researchers don't seem to grasp the realities of the criminal justice system whilst the lawyers (like me) lack even the most basic research skills necessary to capture and evaluate data.

I don't know. If I survive London and a DETC J.S.D. from, say, NWCU? were available, I might indeed go after it. The need is there, I think, and the professional rewards could be great.

 

I don't really understand the practitioner-related-degree/Ph.D. distinction.

The biotech company that I mentioned above was also hiring D.Pharms. The company felt that properly knowledgeable D.Pharms might be more useful than Ph.D.s in dealing with the hurdles associated with human-trials.

Northwestern Polytechnic University in Fremont Ca. is one of ACICS' doctoral pilots. They've just rolled out a DBA and a Doctor of Computer Engineering (DCE) degree.

I don't really know what's up with the DCE, but I expect that DCE's will end up in competition with Ph.D.s in CS and computer engineering.

 

I'm not sure scientific examples are relevant; DETC doesn't seem to be accrediting degree programs in such areas.

It is clear that many, many doctorate holders do not work in academia and ply their degrees in either government or the private sector. I don't see why degrees from DETC-accredited schools wouldn't be as useful (or nearly) as those from other DL doctorate-granting schools like the ones typically discussed here.

 

This is correct. I understand that they were put into the exact same databases as the accredited dissertations. Within the database, I was told that they would be labeled as research abstracts rather than dissertations.

 

I know of a program (I think it's either at Boston University or Boston College) that results in a JD/MSW degree combination. As I understand it the MSW component tends toward either a Clinical concentration or a Public Policy concentration. In the former case graduates tend to move into the forensic psychology field related to "competency to stand trial" issues. In the latter case graduates tend to move toward political action/legislative sorts of careers. I don't believe I've ever seen a JD/PhD program, however. Are there any around?
Jack
(BTW, perhaps this was understood but the JD/MSW program I mentioned is not a DL program)