Easy PhD

- Admission - Doctorate programmes in Germany (brick and mortar ones): if you have a solid MA and a good idea, and you find a professor willing to accept you - you're almost always in. I know in fact someone who did an MA sans MLitt (without the thesis), which usually bars the admission to PhD, but was accepted nevertheless by his supervisor and consequently, by the university.

- Flexible in delivery - isn't that the problem with PhD? Procastination? Writing in this forum instead of writing my dissertation? Better (of course I didn't take it): rigid programmes with horrible deadlines and a big guy a who beats you up every time you don't sit on your work. Superglue to link your behind with the chair not included in the tuition, but recommended.

- Relatively inexpensive? Back to Germany, where you usually pay only administrative fees of $200 or so. I also heard that Harvard and Yale have great grants for their students.

- Recognized by the public/academia? - the abovementioned programmes are.

It depends what one means by "easy".

Financially, being a PhD student is difficult, in any type of programme. If "easy" means "for free", I am yet to find a programme that is entirely for free, including your living expenses. Of course, many private US institutions have great scholarships for their grads.

Intellectually, well, the whole point of a PhD is to write something new, innovative for your discipline. It might be easy of the Einsteins here, the rest would have to labour. It was even difficult for Richard Feynman, according to his books.

 

WARGUNS obviously you have not attempted and Ed doc. Perception does not equal reality. Most Ed docs are rigorous and campare to many other docs.

 

easy

I teach research methods and statistics in one of the "best" RA Education PhD programs in the West. Most of the students could not enroll in any other Phd program.

 

What PhD does Cal State LA offer?
I could not find it on their web site (Other Cal State Schools offer PhDs jointly with other schools).


As a side a friend is doing her masters at Cal State LA in speech therapy and has landed a job at over $60K with no experience upon a profs recomendation.

 

Warguns:

It is sad to see that you have such a low opinion of your students.

Duff

 

I saw it on a list once. I think it was a PhD in educational leadership or something similar (not sure, though). And I suspect they offered in in conjunction with UCLA. Perhaps they no longer offer it. I was just pulling an illustration out of the air.

 

Trivia time. Who is the most famous person with a Stanford education doctorate? My vote goes to Gene Scott. His Stanford thesis was entitled "Niebuhr's Ideal Man And Protestant Christian Education."

I spent many hours listening to Dr. Scott in my youth. Now my brain is fried.

 

PE Teachers

My experience is the same Chip - there seems to be an abundance of former PE teachers in the ranks of public school administrators. Wonder if someone has researched it. I have some theories, but not any facts.

 

===

I see. I thought your referent was the background of the student. In the US, as you know, seminary ThD degrees have mostly been replaced by PhD degrees with no change in faculty. And yes, we do care what you think

 

http://www.calstatela.edu/dept/sped/

Stanford seems to only offer one Ed.D. program, in Administration and Policy Analysis. None of Stanford's Education Ph.D. programs appear to be in Special Education.

http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/programs-degrees/index.html

I'd suggest that if you want to get a Ph.D. in educating neurologically handicapped children, CSULA might actually trump Stanford. Strange, but true.

 

For what it's worth, that's actually a joint degree with UCLA. It sounds like UCLA is the conferring university:

DJ

 

Okay. Okay -- I concocted a poor illustration to make my point. Certainly no dis on Cal State/UCLA PhDs intended. Obviously, any degree issued by UCLA is going to trump a degree issued by a junior university.

 

Again I must disagree with you Warguns. My program was in the top 10 in US News for each of the past 10 years. Most of my peers, including myself, had been accepted in other programs. Our own program accepted less than 30% of the applicants. I chose the program because of my interests. I have been accepted for doctoral studies in other fields. My disertation was a finalist for top dissertation (across many fields). My guess is your perception regarding education docs has to do more with personal bias, than with reality. Many of the greatests minds in the world had ed docs, such as Malcolm Knowles, Stephen Brookfield, Charles Houle, and John Dewey.

 

I'm not familiar with this program.

But San Francisco State has a similar joint-doctoral program in Special Education with UC Berkeley. That one is awarded jointly by both universities and both universities' names are on the diploma.

I believe that both SFSU and CSULA started their Special Ed programs in 1948, as the result of state legislation calling for the establishement of graduate programs to meet special-education needs of the physically disabled in Northern and Southern California.

SFSU in particular developed an emphasis in educating the blind. It introduced some then-new techniques and by the late 60's was one of only four orientation-and-mobility programs in North America. (The others being CSULA, Boston College and Western Michigan U.) As the other three were rehabilitation oriented, SFSU was almost certainly the leading program in the country in addressing the O&M needs of blind individuals from birth to twenty.

Eventually a joint-doctoral program was started wth UC Berkeley, but it wasn't really a matter of SFSU crawling up to Berkeley on its knees. Berkeley was as interested in tapping into SFSU as vice-versa. It's actually a nationally prominent program in this specialized but necessary area.

When I was at SFSU they used to hold summer institutes for prospective teachers of the blind. The students lived in the college dorms and for part of their program had to wear blindfolds constantly. They tapped their way around campus with their white canes, they went to class blindfolded, they read their materials in braile. If they went out into San Francisco, they had to negotiate public transportation blindfolded. While they were doing that, other students had to teach them mobility skills and keep them from getting run over at intersections. I still remember seeing them stumbling into flower beds. It's not easy and I guess you don't understand it until you have to do it. Which is why they all had to do it.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~amandal/viwelcome.htm

Well, to make this relevant to Degreeinfo, it seems that SFSU rolled out a DL Educational Specialist Credential Program in Visual Impairments.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~amandal/yearrounddistance.htm

Unfortunately the recent state budget crisis has kind of put the program in hibernation. It's only offering one DL class a semester for the next two years. But hell, it's the closest thing to a DL program that I've seen out of SF State yet.

 

The list is on the Cal State system site. CSULA has a PhD in special Education. See: http://www.calstatela.edu/centers/moreprograms/bridges/B2PhD.htm and http://www.calstatela.edu/centers/moreprograms/rise/risephd.htm
It is in conjunction with UCLA.

The Cal State System has the following Phd programs:

Long Beach 9261 Engineering and Industrial Applied Mathematics PhD
Los Angeles 8081 Special Education PhD
San Diego 4011 Biology PhD
San Diego 19051 Chemistry PhD
San Diego 20031 Clinical Psychology PhD
San Diego 4201 Ecology PhD
San Diego 8011 Education PhD
San Diego 9012 Engineering Science PhD
San Diego 22061 Geography PhD
San Diego 12201 Language and Communicative Disorders PhD
San Diego 8997 Mathematics and Science Education PhD
San Diego 12141 Public Health PhD
San Francisco 8081 Education PhD


Note that several of them are actually in conjunction wiht other schools (UCSD or Claremont mostly).

 

The easiest PhD requires a good inkjet or color laser printer, some parchment-style paper, a good quality graphic that resembles a university seal and some old-English fonts installed on your computer.


Tony Pina
Faculty, Cal State U. San Bernardino

 

Interestingly, San Diego State U. is now classified by Carniegie as a Doctoral/Research institution. Other Cal States are Masters/Comprehensive institutions.

Tony Pina
Faculty, Cal State U. San Bernardino

 

Re: re: easy PhD

As a teacher of “research methods and statistics in one of the ‘best’ RA Education PhD programs in the West”, you are certainly aware that much of the “generally accepted wisdom” is, in fact, abject foolishness fueled by ignorance.

Since you have access to both the training and tools necessary to avoid making foolish statements, I must assume that you have actual data to back up your comments. Since you have generalized to the entire population of 2000+ higher education institutions, I assume that your sampling techniques are sound and that your data analyses are appropriate to the design. Did you use, for example, a random sample of all 600+ doctoral programs in education and compare this sample to a similar sample of programs from all other academic disciplines? Did you compare different disciplines within education (e.g. instructional technology vs. curriculum/instruction vs. ed psych)? Was your design experimental, quasi-experimental or some other research design? Was MANOVA, Multiple linear regression analysis or some other method used?

If, however, your statement is based on research that education students tend to be older than students of other disciplines and have had a significantly longer time span between having taken their last math course and their first graduate statistics course (and thus tend to struggle with stats more than other students), I would be interested in your sample and analysis data as well.

You asked for it

Tony