Interesting conversation I had on the plane today

I was sitting next to a professor from a top tier (research) university in Florida and started to talk to her about pursuing a PhD to teach. She said there is a tremendous amount of degree snobbery at top tier university’s (UF, FSU, UCF, USF) compared to lower non-research schools (UNF, New College, Eckard) in Florida and I am sure this hold true everywhere.

Top tier schools will not accept an online PhD to teach. I asked about Nova and she said as soon as they started to offer online DBA’s, they lost credibility in academia. She said they have guest speaker at a conference and he introduced himself as having a DBA from Nova, but it was before they offered online degrees. I asked if it made a difference that they met once a month for classroom work and she said NO.

She said an online PhD would get you a position with a CC or a lower tier university. She told me about the requirements she sets for her PhD students and they are not even close to anything I have had to do. She, or the school – not sure, requires they are published in a top journal. She said there is only 8-10 “acceptable” journals for her field which is computer science. Anything else below these 8-10 journals is not acceptable.

She also said if one of her students completed a PhD in two years, she would be questioned and possible lose her ability to bestow PhD’s.

Again, this is only one person’s story. Does anyone else teach at a research university? Does this sound inline with other stories?

 

Randell,

That is unfortunate. This is the same attitude in history. The very same. I think( I hope) in time this will change.

 

I used to be a PhD candidate at a top-tier research university in a humanities field. I made it through to ABD status. Here's quick run-through of the workload:

Three to four years of taking classes. Typical workload:
-- each class meeting once a week for 3 hours
-- 700-1000 pages of reading on average each week per class. This would include one to three main texts and then 5-10 scholarly articles about the main texts. You would be expected to discuss them intelligently in class for 3 hours.
-- a 15-20 page paper due at the end of class.
-- People would typically take two to three classes per semester, multiply the requirements above 2x, 3x to see how much reading would be necessary.
-- a few undergraduate classes sprinkled in here and there as necessary, for example language classes.

Teaching
-- starting in the second year, teaching one lower-level undergraduate class a semester. Teaching higher-level undergraduate classes as you progress. Necessary to build up your C.V. and earn some money.

Misc.
-- Publishing, conferences, etc. In the beginning stages this was more about going to conferences, building up a paper bank and learning about the whole process. Later on you would be expected to start going to conferences and getting published in minor journals so the pressure and worktime load becomes much stronger.
-- assorted meetings, departmental bureacracy, helping professors with their projects (everything from translating their articles to sitting their dog).
-- any part-time jobs you're working, including extra adjunct teaching jobs at different schools.

Dissertation and "going on the job market"
-- I can't comment too much about this because I bailed on it

The average time to completion in my field was about 8 years. I didn't have much contact with non-humanities students, but I did talk to a few at meetings and their workload certainly wasn't any lighter.

 

QV,

Was it history? You just summed up the road to the History PhD.

 

Nope, Comparative Literature. I took one social science course (Sociology) and the process there seemed pretty similar, although there it involved more quantitative elements and a greater emphasis on research, which I'm sure is probably true for History as well.

 

Look at this in perspective, though. I imagine that there are still more "qualified" Ph.D. holders out there from top tier schools than there are faculty positions at "top tier" schools. In other words, the student should be realistic about his goals when making decisions about his education.

Law is a little easier, I'd guess, because ther are a LOT of law professorships out there and only a small percentage of J.D.s want to teach. (Nice thing about the professional doctorate; you can have a very nice life outside the academy!)

Still, if MY goal had been to teach law at a top tier school, I would have done things very differently. I would have applied to ALL of the top ten schools and gone to whichever one I could get into. I would have clawed my way onto Law Journal at best or at least onto one of the specialized journals these schools publish. And I would have published papers as quickly and as often as I could.

In short, the level of financial and get-a-life sacrifice would have been an order of magnitude greater than it was. With moving, maybe TWO orders. And believe me, law school as I actually did it required a LOT of sacrifice.

And for what? There are still a lot fewer opeings at top tier law schools than there are professorial hopefuls so I might well have had to take whatever faculty position in whatever law school came my way. University of North Dakota, anyone? Texas Tech in Lubbock? Good schools, to be sure, all ABA schools are good schools, but do I want to LIVE there?

If you want to teach business at Wharton, a UOP Ph.D. might not get you there! If you want to teach engineering at CalTech, an MIT or Cornell Ph.D. might prove indispensible!

 

I don't know much about online PhDs, but I imagine they would be somewhat of a handicap when it came to some of the job qualifications top schools are looking for in professors.

How many classes have you taught? What is your teaching record? Can you show us positive student evaluations? How many committees have you served on? What was your leadership contribution to your department? Will you be ready for admin duties as a professor?

Other people have mentioned this before, and I definitely agree... the only academic hiring situation where an online PhD would be on equal footing or even at an advantage is in a field like online instructional design. The graduate would hopefully have picked up a ton of experience designing and teaching classes. In other situations, I could see that an online PhD could make themselves just as competitive as a regular candidate, but they would have to do a ton of that preparation on their own with much less of a support network.

 

I did my PhD at a university (Stanford) at which the basic goal of the graduate school was to produce future faculty members. I started as part of a group of 20 PhD students. 10 made it to the finishing line, with the first finishing in a little over four years and the last in about 8 years full time. It took me 6+ years full time.

As Randell1234 points out, several publications in decent journals were expected before the advisor would accept that he/she had obtained his/her pound of flesh from you and allow you to graduate.

There's no way you could finish in two years -- if you were smart enough to do so, that itself would be reason enough for the advisor to hold on to you to generate some more publications in top journals. The quickest I ever heard of anyone finishing was about 3.5 years full time.

 

I generally agree with the thrust of this thread.

But I think that the woman that Randell talked to made a serious mistake by equating easy or non-scholarly with online or DL.

In subjects where laboratory work or hands-on practice aren't necessary, I don't see any reason why an online program can't be as rigorous and demanding as people want it to be. It can demand years of full-time study. It can provide all kinds of opportunities for online collaboration. It can require that students attend conferences and publish. It could even arrange the equivalent of teaching assistantships, at local community colleges perhaps.

The reason that few if any existing DL doctoral programs do that isn't a defect of the medium, it's a business decision.

DL targets the older midcareer individual. These people typically want a degree for promotional purposes in something like public school administration. These are people who want programs that are simultaneously part-time and fast-track, disrupting their jobs and families as little as possible. DL doesn't really target those aiming at becoming academic careerists or researchers.

But it could. Of course, the question then would be: what's the point? If you are going to study full-time for years on end, then why not go live at the university? Why DL?

I can think of reasons, such as gathering together a world-wide critical mass of students for extremely obscure and highly specialized subjects. But the lucrative market is clearly the less scholarly promotional/practitioner one that's currently being served.

It does kind of explain the disdain that some university professors (the academic careerists) have for DL doctoral programs, though. That disdain is probably going to continue until the blessed day arrives when professors can't stay current in their specialty without responding to work produced by DL programs and DL scholars.

DL will get nowhere by pleading for academic respect, it has to seize it by playing the game and by becoming more research productive.

 

I don't think that the relative difficulty of the Ph.D. program is quite the point. It's more like, "Which eminent scholar has passed his mantle on to YOU?"

There's something to be said for this. In law school, I learned quite a lot about what Lawrence Tribe had to say about constitutional law. He has a definite, well deserved reputation and his scholarship has become fundamental to mainstream analysis. (His textbook is an absolute standard.)

What I did NOT do, and maybe could have done had I attended Harvard Law School instead of the University of New Mexico, is study with Tribe himself, maybe even worked directly for him or written my first published article with his collaboration. I might well have seen what the next steps in research should be to expand his work, research that he no longer has time or energy to do. If nothing else, such a connection must help with finding funding and getting published.

This is the heart of the research doctoral process, IIUC. You learn to be a scholar in a given field by working with established scholars in that field. Naturally, the more promising students (which would NOT have included me) are more likely to hook up with the more important scholars. Naturally too, once these elite doctors start looking for positions, they will have the enormous advantage of their scholar's contacts and reputation.

Hence, elite schools perpetuate their elite status.

 

Dr. D

What is Dr. Rich Douglas say about this?

 

What an action-packed, astute thread!

 

The main problem I see with the online vs brick and mortar doctorate degree is that there seems to be A LOT (and that's an understatement) work required for a doctorate, be it online or on-ground. I respect all of you attending touro, northcentral, walden, capella, nova and the like because I do not have the self discipline to take online/distance courses.

Elitism is irritating, how can you ultimately dismiss the quality of something that you have no idea about? There is a measure of quality, and if a school is RA and has an online program, it seems they go through a much more rigorous process than the etablished B&M universities. Now, I understand that the B&M's have been around for a long time, but you can bet that if they decide to implement a distance program (which is nothing more than a monetary thing most of the time rather than a service to the students) they won't receive nearly as much scrutiny. Please don't confuse this with unaccredited vs accredited, I only reference accredited RA schools since DETC schools cannot offer doctorates (yet).

I would be very upset if someone told me that something I worked extremely hard at for years wasn't as good as someone else's work because it didn't come from a large research university.

I'm ok with a Bachelor's from UOP because I know it will get my what I want, and I didn't have to completely kill myself to get it. i worked very hard for all of my degrees (even the A.A's) and would get extremely offended if someone told me that they didn't mean anything as if I had bought one from a mill.

I agree that one day this will change as the general acceptance of online/non-traditional degrees has, but it's just generally discouraging to think about.

Sorry for the long rant, this one hits me close to home because of my field and what I have to hear everyday, not just about UOP but all non-traditional/online/adult centered institutions.

 

This is what bothers me about the academic frauds that think they can get a real doctorate from a place like KWU or Knightsbridge University. Real doctorate degrees require much more work, typically six years of full time effort. Two or three years of part time work is a pathetic joke compared to the real deal.

Oxpecker's post also points out what I think is another very important difference. Even a place like CCU, those doctorates are questionable from my understanding because they don't require the candidate to publish anything. I also doubt that they typically require 6 years of full time effort.

 

I have to agree as to the Ph.D. But professional/dissertation doctorates like the J.S.D. and the D.B.A. should not require quite that much time, should they? The more practical approach and the somewhat lesser emphasis on "original, significant contribution" SHOULD result in a more cut-and-dried process, shouldn't it?

 

Yes, thank you for the clarification/correction, I should have been more specific and said Ph.D..

 

I agree. Very interesting thread without any ad hominem remarks from anyone.

Sulla

 

Hi Myles,

Thanks for giving us online students this recognition. Many of us take for granted that online learning is not the easiest thing in the world. It is a very lonely process and communication with faculty can be a challenge without little, if any, face to face contact. In addition, knowing the bias that one might experience after graduation can snap away at your motivation.

I'm at getting closer to finish my PhD from Capella. However, I'm NOT one of those super-smart students who finish in two years. So far I've been in the doctoral program for 4 years (1 and 1/2 years in the dissertation process and going), but it is getting more and more difficult to motivate myself to finish. I'll say this, the thrill of being called a 'doctor' is gone already. However, the most exciting part of this journey has been the dissertation process. Yes, I've experienced quite a bit of bumps along the way such as: multiple revisions, change of population target, IRB approval and re-submissions, etc. Doing all this online with little face to face contact can be quite challenging. I'm still collecting data but I'm just happy to be able to seek new knowledge to a field that I have strong passion for.

Maybe someday, I want another PhD and plan to teach at research universities (and don't have a job or kids to feed), then I might enroll at a B&M full time and take it from there.

Sulla

 

Yup, this is pretty much what I hear too.

 

Excellent thread.

Unfortunately, elitism is rampant at research universities. Since there are many PhDs vying for relatively few faculty positions at these institutions, top-tier research universities can afford to make sure that new faculty are "one of their own". Like any exclusive society, there is a built-in culture and the associated prejudices arising from that culture. Elitism exists at "teaching" universities as well, but is not quite as pervasive.

Regarding online doctorates, there is a perception that they are less rigorous and, therefore, are not as suitable for preparing research faculty. The traditional research university model is the eminent scholar working in the lab with a few chosen young doctoral students. These students learn by a combination of hands-on experience and osmosis, working alongside the professor (often doing a large chunk of the work for little or no pay and often very little credit or acknowledgement). The better professors will publish journal articles and deliver conference presentations jointly with their students (giving the students the coveted "first author" position if the students did the bulk of the work). The more selfish (and, in my opinion, less professional) professors will take full credit for the work, relegating their students' credit to "acknowledgement" sections. Much of the professor's teaching load is delegated to other graduate students.

In contrast, the virtual university appeals primarily to those who are already established in their fields by means of job and other practical experience. They generally have interrupted their studies by going to work, raising families and other "real world" activities. They tend to be older, more established in their opinions and expectations of their education and less likely to be "molded" by the professor. Unfortunately, opportunities for professional collaboration with professors (e.g. research projects, conference presentations, journal articles, grants) are severely limited. If there was a way to address this issue, I believe that graduates of the virtual programs would have greater success as university faculty.

Virtual universities have the potential to produce scholars with different perspectives than the often "inbred" students who study at a university and then are hired by the same university as faculty (look at how many Ivy League professors are teaching a the same university where they earned their doctorate).

All of my degrees were earned through traditional methods. Had I known about non-traditional options earlier, I would possess at least one additional degree and would have earned my other degrees sooner. I have a great deal of respect for those who decide to pursue their doctorates via distance learning and would definitely consider someone with a doctorate from Capella, Walden, NCU or one of Nova Southeastern online programs for a position at my university.

Tony Piña
Administrator, Northeastern Illinois University
AA, BA, EdM Brigham Young University
EdD La Sierra University