Columbia Southern University dropping DBA

Without the DBA degree, Columbia Southern University is now useless to me.

 

With Columbia Southern's DBA now out of the picture, I wonder how many DETC DBAs remain.

 

I'm sure you can find that out at a super-secret website: Distance Education and Training Council | National Accreditor of Distance Education Institutions :smile:

 

When Harvard School of Education invented the Ed.D. (according to Harvard Corp.policy, only the College of Arts and Sciences can award the Ph.D.), it had the opportunity to create a true practitioner degree for educational leaders. They should have done the Ed.S. with an applied project, rather than a dissertation, rather than the Ed.D., but they caved into discipline envy and created a copy of the Ph.D. and we have been stuck with two degrees that have minor differences at a few institutions, but are mostly the same. Only at Vanderbilt and a few other institutions, has a concerted effort been made to have mutually exclusive degrees Ph.D. and Ed.D. degrees. However, Vanderbilt is the exception, rather than than the norm.

In the case of Harvard School of Business a decade or so later, an "applied practitioner" business doctorate was created (the D.C.S,), but it was seen as not very rigorous and was not popular, so HBS remade it into a Ph.D. clone and dubbed it the D.B.A. If it wasn't for Harvard's Ph.D. "turf" policy, we would likely not have the Ed.D. or the D.B.A.

The designation "professional doctorate" has not been defined by the US DoE. DETC (smartly) took advantage of the lack of definition and created a definition of "professional doctorate" that includes research doctorates (more or less anything but the Ph.D.). US DoE allowed this to happen--it did not provide redefine the research doctorate or first professional degrees (other than having a branch of the DoE change the latter to Doctoral Degree-Professional Practice). If I was the DETC, I would have probably done the same thing.

 

In the UK, a "professional doctorate" is a practice-based non-Ph.D. Two books on this:

Professional Doctorates: Integrating Academic and Professional Knowledge (Society for Research Into Higher Education): David Scott, Andrew Brown, Ingrid Lunt, Lucy Thorne: 9780335213320: Amazon.com: Books

Achieving your Professional Doctorate (Open Up Study Skills): Nancy-Jane Smith: 9780335227211: Amazon.com: Books

There are others.

The professional doctorate is a research degree, just as the Ph.D. is. However, it is always a "taught" degree (courses with a "small book" thesis). Also, one is (normally) not expected to make a contribution to theory, but to practice instead. (This isn't always true. The DSocSci at the University of Leicester is a professional doctorate, but the university still expects scholarly contribution. Go figure.)