People with education degrees looked upon with scorn? Not just DL but B&M too.

I cannot speak to the rigor or quality of your specific education program. However, in my experience faculty outside of education view education doctorates GENERALLY as less rigorous. I base this statement on my interaction with faculty across the country representing professional and liberal arts disciplines. That being said, faculty in the hard sciences view all other degrees as less rigorous.

Stats CAN be a huge part of an education degree. There ARE Ph.D. programs in education whose requirements include a rigorous, advanced coverage of statistics and encourage coursework or minors in the pure social sciences.

I would argue that business, education and criminal justice are all applied social science disciplines with numerous research questions that can be answered using statistics-based methods. Business, education and criminal justice has foundations in and questions which are associated with sociology, psychology and economics. Accordingly, I believe that I am comparing apples-to-apples, at least with respect to research tool courses.

It was not unusual at my doctoral institution for students from all of the social sciences except for education, to take stats, research methods and other quantitative analysis courses in each others' departments. Education courses were off limits to all of us, at least for use as research tool courses. Conversely, it was rare for us to see an education student in a quantitative course outside the college of education.

 

and people in grass houses should not stow thrones.

 

It is all cool. The direction of thread was irritating to me - kinda hard to buy into an argument about a major being "less-academic" where the support for the argument is along the lines of "I heard a guy once in the faculty lounge.............." is used as evidence to build the case.

 

Frankly, it's difficult for me to take seriously anyone who judges another's discipline to be non-rigorous, a joke, or other such nonsense. I am having too much fun with my career and my institution to be concerned about snobbery (whether it be economic, cultural, racial or educational). Standardized tests (e.g. the SAT) provide a very limited analysis of a very limited skill set (math, English & reading). These are the easiest skills to assess, so that is why we use them as measures. They can be useful to predict certain outcomes, but not whether one is unemployable because, while he may be able to do math well and correctly analyze a paragraph, he is an insufferable jerk and snob, who cannot work and play well with others. SAT, ACT, GRE and GMAT can't really assess that

So far, my Ed.D. has not proven to be a liability. For my last position, I was chosen over 200 other candidates, a large percentage of which had Ph.Ds. For the position before that, it was 40 other candidates (about 1/2 had Ph.D.s)

But, what do I know, I'm just one of those "ignernt" ejucashun folks.

 

It's clear you are not an education major.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

You know... I really wonder about this whole conversation, and if there's any validity to the truth that people do find education to be less rigorous. I'm not saying it is, but perhaps there are people who think so...

In Virginia, you cannot major in education as an undergrad, however, my wife, who earned for BA in Educational Studies from the University of Delaware, DID major in education. Why is it that Virginia does not allow it, but Delaware does? Could Virginia believe that it's "less rigorous" and not worthy of being a major?

-Matt

 

@MattBrent

If I had to guess in the case of Virginia I'd keep it simple and state that in that state if you want to major in education it's probably expected to be after you attain some standing in a discipline you intend to teach. So a person could get a Masters in Education from a Ph.D in Education but in order to be considered as needing a degree in education you should be an educator teaching something like History or English or Math/Science etc.

Not to detract from the jist of where you were going with that but I'm an Occam's Razor kind of guy.

 

I'm educated by George Carlin. Some of these threads enlighten the mind in their own special ways.

 

Apparently people are mistaking my tone as anger when it is really sarcasm. I wasn't mad. My #$@% meter just got full, so I replied. That is fine. I suppose it is my fault for not evaluating how things would come across through writing. Maybe I will start using more emoticons showing eyes rolling. My bad.

I do think it is ironic that on a distance education forum (of all places), that people are so quick to post sweeping assertions about an entire field, especially when those posts cannot be taken any way other than that a particular major is somehow less than other majors. This is the same forum that is filled with people who lose it when others degrade the validity of legit distance education programs.

 

Looking at this thread from a high level, it appears true that the general statement that some people consider education degrees with some scorn. I'm not saying that it is true. My personal uneducated guess on the issue is that it is probably not really true. I do find it interesting though that there does seem to be this general poor reputation floating around. It seems amusingly similar to the general poor reputation floating around in some peoples' mind regarding distance learning degrees. My daughter told me the other day that she stopped taking online courses at school because they were a lot more work.

 

I find it ironic that you find it ironic that when someone yells fire and asks for feedback that you'd think that anyone would reply in a completely logical and detached way on a forum where everyone is going to have a personal stake in the emberpit.

 

I find it ironic that you find it ironic that I find it ironic that... I forgot what we were talking about.

 

Speaking from first hand experience, edowave is correct. I'm in an Ed.M program at Harvard, compared to my MBA program and the handful of courses I've taken at HES it's pretty easy.

 

Do you see the ed department at Harvard as a "kitten that ought to be drowned" as Sowell says?

 

Not at all, there are some very bright students and faculty in the school, most are far to liberal for my taste, especially the students in the policy program, but pretty sharp. That said, I probably have a greater proportion of dumb classmates in this program than any of the others I've completed.

 

But then again, the ability to teach phonics to a 1st grader is not the same kind of skill as getting a high score on the SAT. So maybe they are smart in other ways, I hope.

 

IIRC, Dr. Bear's Ph.D. is in Communication, not Education.

 

Yes, I started this thread with no idea how upset some people would get. I'm certainly not offended when someone says that my EdD (in progress) is not as rigorous as a PhD in Physics or Finance, or whatever. I would agree. Not offended...don't really care.

 

That's the way to look at it.