Is a DL Doctorate a New Kind of Animal?

May I ask which school you earned your doctorate from?

 

What about someone who has served on thesis and dissertation committees for students at both non-profit and for-profit universities?

 

That really would be a fascinating study and would definitely contribute to the knowledge base. However, I would be hesitant to equate a dissertation's impact with its quality. A dissertation on a "hot" topic would likely be more referenced than one on a more obscure topic, even though the latter may have a better formulated research questions, a more comprehensive literature review and more sophisticated statistical analyses. It also may be difficult to tell how many articles were based on a given dissertation. Research conducted for my dissertation formed the basis for three published peer-reviewed articles and a book, but I am not sure how someone would be able to determine that.

Also, there are about 50,000 research doctorates awarded each year (with less than 2,000 via DL), so that would be quite a large population from which to draw.

I do not say this to discourage you from pursuing the research, only to be realistic about the inferences that one could realistically draw from the study.

 

There indeed limitations but if the sample is large enough, we should be able to offset some of these issues.

The results of the research could answer a lot of questions that are posted here and give grounds to make better decisions.

 

I think this would be a noteworthy study. One of the limitations or considerations would also need to be how many DL PhD students attempted or are interested in publishing in a peer journal. I know I would love to but at this point my schedule prohibits this the time committment required (or I assume is required). What would be very interesting is to get data on submitted articles for publication and see what percentage is rejected based on poor quality for DL schools / B&M schools / profit / non-profit. At least you would be pulling from a pool of individuals that made attempts.

 

I would say - YES!

 

I'm afraid that this data wouldn't be possible to obtain due to privacy policies. You would need to get permission from those that submitted the articles that were rejected and this would make it so hard to collect.

I just spoke to a friend of mine that is doing his PhD in a major school in Canada. He is telling me that jobs are so hard to get that many supervisors are requiring at least 3 major publications in journals before they are allowed to defend as many are graduating and are unable to secure employment because the publication requirements.

Even small schools are asking for some publications. I just noticed that Kaplan (an online school) and NCU are asking for publications for online adjunct positions.

It looks like the PhD won't be worth much unless the graduate has publications.

 

This has me thinking a lot. I love the idea. What is the right "number" or percent or ration of peer articles to textbooks? Since many DL PhD programs are somewhat new, would you factor in the time since the school started to award degrees or number of degrees to see how many peer articles were written on the dissertation findings?

When it comes to "number of peer reviewed articles that were published based on dissertations", surely, it would not be a fair judge the history and number of articles written based on a PhD from a school that has been around 50 years compared to a school that has been around awarding PhDs for 3-5 years.

 

I had actually suggestion a publication requirement to NCU...still waiting for a response. I am holding my breath...

The publication requirement is a valuable part. It removes the bias on DL schools (or at least helps) and gives the graduates a chance to put their money where their mouth is...or at least a quality publication.


Disclaimer - I have published 4 articles in trade magazines but never a peer journal

 

I would think that publishing in a trade journal is still a respectable feat. Maybe it won't get you a professorship at Yale, but even a trade journal article should add some creditability to your degree. Shouldn't it?

 

Here is a job for online adjunct from kaplan

Accounting Online Instructor - HigherEdJobs

It requires:

"Two journal articles published in the past 5 years or 1 journal article and two refereed conference papers published in proceedings."


Here from NCU
Career Opportunities | Northcentral University

"Applicants must have an appropriate terminal degree (PhD) and current research experience (demonstrated by recent publications and presentations)."


It looks like online schools are getting serious about this.

 

That should help with their credibility.

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I actually got paid for two of them.

 

They all seem to start requiring publications but their doctoral programs do not promote anything that lead their students to actually publish. I remember sending two emails to my capstone course professor at TUI (while finishing up my IT Management MS program) regarding the steps or information pertaining to publishing. My first email was ignored, and the second one came with the reply "consider enrolling in our PhD in Business." I quietly finished my program and walked away; making sure they will never see my DL tuition dollars again (I say this because I considered one their PhD programs).

Raising the entry standards for adjunct teachers, and at the same time, lowering admission standards to allow as many students (who will pay a lot in tuition in the shortest possible time) in is pure nonsense that no one will buy. The standards need to be raised on both ends, not just on adjunct teachers (due to proliferation of the online teaching field that is creating abundance of applications for every opening). I think UoP figured this out; that's why they now publish their own journal to promote publishing among students who are interested in publishing.

 

They also need to work on helping their students publish at least one article by the time they graduate. It seems they are doing this because the online teaching field is becoming saturated with too many applications (from PhD holders from internet schools) for the few jobs available. In the next few years, except new programs are added to the pool of doctoral programs (majority in business, which I despise) that online schools offer, new doctoral grads from online schools will be shocked that even with their expensive PhDs, they still can't get an online adjunct teaching job. They used to require a master degree with or without experience to teach undergrad course. Now they are requiring a doctoral degree, in addition to teaching experience, and publications in journals to be given an adjunct position. To show seriousness, they need to tighten up their admission standards to prevent unqualified students from enrolling in a program that costs them a fortune, as well as, a programs that many will never finish (something Dr. Wagner points out frequently).

 

According to Dr. Pina, the percentage of new doctorates that come from DL schools is something under 5%. I don't actually have any information on this, but if what he says is correct, I don't see how the field could be saturated because of DL doctorates. It appears that over 95% of all doctorates are from B&M schools, so if there is saturation, it would have to be from B&M schools. Those statistics do not support the idea of a surge in DL doctorate holders. Do you have statistics that refute this?

 

We discussed this a while ago, the issue is that although DL degrees count for small percentage, the vast majority of online degrees are in the fields of education and business. If we consider this, the percentage is more significant. The statistics are in those threads and can be found with the search engine.

Regardless of the percentage, the consensus is that these degrees are not really a threat to those doing degrees at traditional schools. I also found quite a few resumes from a resume site from people with doctorate degrees from online schools doing odd or unrelated to their field jobs.

There are many unanswered questions but there is some evidence of the lack of utility of doctorates from internet only schools. One could collect resumes from people with online doctorates to see if their current employment is correlated with their level of education and also measure the impact of the dissertations in the academic environment. However, I doubt people will stop taking these programs even if there are 100 articles that show questionable return of investments, there are many articles that show that MBAs from low tier schools have almost no value but you still see thousands or people taking them.

I still see a lot of people posting in degree forums how their online DBA or MBA from a virtual school helped them to land that VP or get that senior position, people tend to believe these testimonials that might come from the same schools selling the degrees.

 

Wouldn't it be easier to have a "sticky" with one argument so people can just contain this regurgitation of positions in one place? We have a “DL PhDs aren’t work the paper they are printed on” thread and a “yes they are” thread. It must get tiring for people to just keep posting the same things as the opportunities come up. I know it is for me. :smile: :smile: :smile: