Unisa PhD in Finance

At least UNISA have permanent staff. Most of the for profits like TUI, NCU, Capella, etc use rented faculty to supervise your dissertation. Many of these for profits pay you few thousands per dissertation and only if the student graduates. I honestly don't think that you could expect much from a part time dissertation adviser that only makes few thousand from your dissertation.

UNISA doesn't have many PhDs because they don't take many PhD students, they might have 3 or 4 at the most per discipline at the time. When I was studying there, I was the only student doing a D.Comm in Quantitative models.

Some people have the impression that schools take hundreds of PhDs candidates. This might be the case at the for profit schools but most traditional schools take very few PhD candidates every year.

 

I heard from this forum that the staff in NCU are usually from Top Us PhD. It is hard to decide whether we should go for UNISA that the staff are mostly Master graduated in a not-so-famous U or go for a very expensive online U but the staff there are PhD from a famous U. Certainly, the online Us do not pay enough for the teachers, therefore, they may not have motivation to teach/advise.

Very hard to decide which way to go.....

 

But these are rented faculty. Think about it, you have a PhD from Harvard and want to make extra couple of thousand on top of your 100K. Do you really think that you going to put the same effort that you put in your full time job? I would go with those schools that have full time faculty for supervision as they will be more serious about supervising my work and actually will push me to publish my work. The NCU rented faculty on the other hand, will be more interested in pushing me to finish fast so they can cash their few thousand for their contract.

There is no point of comparison, UNISA is superior to NCU, TUI, or other for profits. However, you also have the perception factor, people in the US would always wonder why you went as far as Africa to get your doctorate. It is also not a secret that degrees from Africa suffer from bias in general.

In my opinion, the UNISA doctorate would be respected from those that know about Universities (e.g. academic circles) while the NCU doctorate would be more respected in the business environment only because it is American and regionally accredited.

 

UNISA PhD Degrees

For the individual who is confused about Nova, TUI and other versus UNISA, keep an important thing in mind. UNISA is not an American school. So, it is different. Making a comparison between the schools is difficult as one set use the American accreditation scheme and the other uses a form of the Commonwealth scheme.

First decide whether you are qualified for a doctoral degree at UNISA. Do you hold a thesis based Master's degree in the are you wish to pursue doctoral studies in? If you do not, you will not be considered for doctoral study. UNISA does not accept doctoral students directly from the baccalaureate.

If you are acceptable to a Faculty at UNISA, you will be invited to prepare a thesis research proposal. A promoter (now called a supervisor) will be assigned to you if you are invited to take the proposal module. They will help you through your work, but they will likely not "spoon feed" you. In other words, he or she will not give you interesting articles to read. You are expected to be coming to UNISA with the ability to do doctoral research and doctoral reasoning.

The US system may be a better option for you. In the 45 to 60 credits worth of prerequisite coursework you take, you will meet faculty members and be exposed to research and practical cases that will provide you with all sorts of interesting articles and ideas for your dissertation.

Good luck to anyone pursuing a degree in the US or abroad. Just remember not to take UNISA lightly. It is a well respected research institution globally with most of its interest in educating individuals who first advance ZA and then the rest of the world.