Is an online doctorate worth the effort anymore?

For what I see, these people take positions that normally required an MBA 25 years ago. I know few people with doctorates from online institutions that work in regular jobs that do not require even a master's degree. Degree inflation is a problem when credentials become more accessible.

In the last conference that I attended, few faculty members that presented have two doctorates and one 4 masters and a doctorate. One of these faculty with two doctorates just finished an online EdD mainly to teach more online classes on the side.

Walden launched its post doc as way to keep selling more credentials with the hopes that people will look for a post doc to differentiate themselves.

Education is a business and schools will keep selling these credentials as long as there is a market for it. People fear that they will be not competitive enough if they do not hold a doctorate so they buy degrees with the hope that this will make them more employable.

I dont see a harm in making this business doctorates more available. People with degrees from B&M schools are not threatened by these doctorates that lack AACSB acccreditation that is required for most tenure track positions.

 

Don't you mean earn? Buy implies a degree mill.

 

Let's get back to the question posed by the Original Poster:

Maybe post #81 above can answer your question:

The doctorate used to be the ultimate step in the educational process. But not any more. Now you see people pursuing second doctorates. And now you see schools offering "post-doctoral certificates" on top of the doctorate. These developments should tell you that the value of a doctorate is falling. The implication (based on the laws of supply and demand) is that schools are currently producing more doctorates than the market can readily absorb.

 

My mistake, I should have said "pay high tuition fees for degrees"

 

But who cares, by the time students figure it out, the owners of the schools have already retired and sold the school.

By the way, this is not just for online schools. In the last conference that I attended, a British school announced that its online DBA had enrolled 250 students in only a year after its opening.

The DBA is being sold as a credential that will replace the MBA that can also open the doors to academia. People are enrolling in large numbers and this trend will continue for long time regardless of the eroding value of this credential.

The next trend will be online DBA from AACSB accredited schools, few european schools already started this type of programs with large enrollments.

 

B&M institutions have been cranking out more doctorates than what academic jobs and research industries can handle for the last 50 years, so exactly what's your point? The law of supply and demand remains in effect. If the public wants it, then it will be supplied. When public demand subsides, then supply will subside.

Communist countries effectively control the number of students who are allowed to enter (and receive) doctorates, but their rigid standards don't seem to be helping their economies (or anything else).

 

Good point. The reality is that fast track online doctorates create jobs. As more people want to take them, there is more demand of academics that are required to teach them and as there is more demand, more people want to take them as they see an opportunity to make extra money.
The problem with the capitalism is that at some point this will collpase. The increasing demand has a saturation point and as new prospect students see that there is not longer demand.

 

Collapse is a doomsday scenario of biblical proportions that may not be accurate. In a worse case scenario, there may be an education bubble, but like everything else, economic corrections (supply and demand) remedy the situation. In a free enterprise country, supply and demand cyclically remedies excess and lack. Bubbles can be caused by inaccurate public perception about the value of something, such as tulips in Holland, or by too much government infusion of taxpayer monies to keep something economically propped up i.e. Fannie May and Freddie Mac or education loans, etc.

 

I disagree. In many liberal arts fields like literature or history, then yes, it's true that B&M institutions oversupply doctorates. But liberal arts degrees aren't relevant to this thread. This thread is about online doctorates, and online doctorates are almost always professional degrees, typically in either business or education.

And when it comes to business and education doctorates, then B&M schools may not be cranking out more degrees than what academic jobs and research industries can handle. At most B&M schools, the numbers for business and education doctorates are actually rather small.

At online schools, on the other hand, the numbers are much bigger. And so online schools -- unlike B&M schools -- may be cranking more business and education doctorates than the markets can absorb. That's the point.

There is considerable demand from the public for Ivy League doctorates. Is that demand being supplied? Not necessarily. For example, I think all Ivy League schools combined could easily enroll more than 60 DBA candidates per year. Yet they don't.

So for Ivy League DBAs, demand is high, but supply is kept low. Since demand is considerably higher than supply, those degrees have considerable value.

For online DBAs, demand may also be high -- but the supply rises to meet the demand. Since there is no excess of demand over supply, those degrees have much lower value.

So yes, the laws of supply and demand remain in effect. And those laws should tell you that online doctorates may not be as good an investment as B&M doctorates.

 

Yes, it's reflected in supply and demand i.e. it's reflected in the exorbitantly higher prices that are charged by Ivy League schools, when compared to lower cost state universities. As long as students are willing to pay those high prices, then universities will continue to charge them, whether it be from the Ivy Leagues or from regionally accredited online universities. Supply is meeting the demand because students demand it. See how easy it works?

Caveat Emptor. Let the buyer beware. If you purchase a VW Bug, then don't expect the horsepower of a Mustang. There is academic snobbery amongst B&M universities. Lower tiered B&Ms don't have as much clout as higher tiered B&Ms. Then along comes the red headed stepchild, the regionally accredited online university.

The market for online DBAs is thriving, but the attrition rate may be dismal, but that's another story e.g. in my university, only 15% of those who enrolled for a DBA made it to graduation. The other 85% didn't make it. It's highly unlikely that the 15% who are making it are flooding the United States market.

 

This is not the case for all the fields. AACSB keeps telling us that there is not enough supply of doctorates in business. The same argument is used to sell these online business doctorates as students think that demand is real because of what they read in the AACSB web site and other similar sources.

The reality is that B&M schools that are AACSB accredited take very few doctoral students in order to keep the value of the degree high. If the demand of the doctorates is higher than the supply, new graduates can always demand competitive salaries.

The bottom line of the issue is that online institutions have found a niche market with doctorates. As B&M schools keep the supply low and demand is higher than the offered supply, this unsatisfied demand is satisfied by online schools.

Online schools have lost most of the undegraduate and master's degree market because B&M schools are offering these degrees in distance format so the doctorate seems to be the only level of education that can help them to sustain their business.

The problem is that online schools cannot afford to sell only few degrees but need to sell hundreds if not thousands just to be able survive.

My guess is that B&M schools would want to take over the same market that online schools have now. What I see is that B&Ms are starting to offer DBAs in distance format and not the PhD, this is because they still want to make sure that the PhD remains very prestigious but they don't want to lose the opportunity of making the extra money because the demand doctorates. As a result, we will see that schools will not hire people people with DBAs for tenure track but only PhD in the future as the DBA will be eventually seen as the new MBA and not at the same level as the PhD.

 

That's a good point.

It's highly unlikely that such a conspiracy theory exists.

It's ironic that most B&M faculty previously held the notion that distance learning was inferior and came primarily from degree mills, but now B&Ms are embracing distance learning like a father embraces his prodigal son. B&Ms are showing a lot of love towards something that was once despised and suspect.

Probably not.

It's always been the survival of the fittest in a supply and demand market. State universities and community colleges receive welfare payments, so they will always have an economic advantage over private non-famous universities. The welfare payments to state schools are in the form of taxpayer monies that are used to sustain them, without which, they would cease to exist in a competitive education market, unless state tuition was drastically inflated. And you know it's true.

Disclaimer: this writer is a state university graduate.

That's an interesting speculative conspiracy theory. Did several businessmen, professors, doctoral holders or world leaders conspire together to establish that goal?

 

Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but we had 3 business faculty openings for fall semester. We filled them with the following candidates:

1. DBA Candidate in Finance from Anderson University. Candidate is still in the DBA coursework stage.

2. EdD from Bowling Green State University - This new faculty member has extensive non-profit managerial/executive experience

3. Will leave vacant for Fall 2012 - could not find a suitable candidate.

We had several people come in for interviews and teaching demonstrations with B&M and DL doctorates. I shouldn't have been surprised, but most of the candidates were nor prepared for the teaching demonstration, and/or did not perform basic research on our institution.

OK, that DL doctorate (and I have one), will put you at a disadvantage at a large research university. But the jobs are there for smaller universities...

Shawn

 

Last year, Harvard Business School had 8,963 applications for their MBA program (I don't have the DBA numbers). In other words, nearly 9,000 people were prepared to pay those exorbitant HBS prices.

HBS accepted 13%, or about 1,165 of those applicants. The other 7,798 applicants were politely told to go away. HBS refused to enroll them, or to collect any tuition from them. Incidentally, HBS tuition is currently $87,000, so those 7,798 rejected applicants represent nearly $700,000,000 in tuition that HBS was willing to forego.

Supply is not meeting demand for HBS degrees, for the rather obvious reason that 87% of the demand is being turned away empty-handed. See how easy that works?

 

And hence, the price is rising. When supply isn't enough to meet demand, the price rises commensurately.

 

Since you use the term "candidate" in the doctoral education sense and not just in the job-seeking sense, let me say this: he/she is not (yet) a "candidate" for the degree. Candidacy never occurs during coursework. Depending on the design of the degree and/or the policies of the school, one becomes a candidate when one (a) completes the coursework, (b) passes the comprehensive examinations, or (c) has an approved thesis/dissertation proposal. Strangely, at Union it was the approval of the Learning Agreement, and thus didn't fit any of those categories. At Leicester, it is the approval of the thesis proposal. And so on.

Anderson is either (b) or (c) above.

 

Good point Rich. Our new hire is a DBA student at Anderson University. Thanks for the catch!

Shawn

 

I think it is very well known that Universities prefer PhDs for profesor positions rather than DBAs, DM or D whatever. All you have to do is count the number of DBAs at a well established university versus the number of PhDs and search for faculty positions and see how many are ok with DBAs versus the ones that call for PhDs.

For what I have seen, Universities have no problem selling the DBA in distance format (at least at European and some well known American schools) but they are not so many well known schools offering the PhD in distance format.

There is no conspiracy but just common sense, it is not easy to justify to regular students doing full time 5 year programs that now the same schools are offering these programs online that can be completed in 3 years part time. Students from the regular programs would be dissapointed and think that their programs will lose value. However, if you call these doctorates now DBAs then regular students at PhD programs still feel that they have the advantage.

To me it doesn't really matter if you have DBA, DM, PhD or if your degree comes from UoP, NCU, etc but the quality of research and established teaching career. If someone with a PhD from NCU manages to publish at journals like Management Science, MIS quaterly, etc and has on ground teaching experience, I think this individual would have no problems getting offers from many places at $150K plus regardless of the low recognized degree. However, the reality is that most graduates from online PhD programs are struggling just to complete the minimum requirements of a PhD or DBA so never mind publishing at top tier research journals.

Again, the reality is that graduates from these program are taking jobs at places that once were given to MBAs such as small univerities, community college, etc. We are just inflating credentials that lead to the same jobs.

 

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth." -- Vladimir Lenin