Serving the Market

Pushtu...Pullfrum....

It is rigorous. Before you land your aircraft for your thesis defense, you have to send in some PhD engineering students to build an airstrip and cut a road to the campus.

 

That, of course, makes you a Burma Roads Scholar.

 

The Pushtun are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Their language is called Pushtu. This is the language most commonly spoken in Kabul and Kandahar, and by most of the Taliban.

 

Yes, I have seen suspicion and disrespect for having a DL degree in the academic world. I spent several years working for one school, receiving strong teaching reviews, publishing peer reviewed work and serving in a variety of capacities. I was yanked off tenure track when an administrator saw that I graduated from a DL program. I'm now at another institution that doesn't feel this way at all - I was hired in as an Associate Professor with a short and relatively pain free tenure review.

I have been told by peers at some middle tier regional schools not to bother applying for a job there - there was no way their dean would consider a DL graduate. Not long ago I posted the comments from one academic oriented newsgroup showing a lot of contempt for DL grads.

There are a wide range of perceptions - some folks don't care where you went to school, others care a great deal. Of course, if you stay in industry there probably isn't an issue.

Thanks - Andy

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Andy Borchers, DBA
NSU (1996)

 

Bill - I partially agree with you. Students motivated by the desire to learn, without thinking "career", have the purest of motives. There certainly is nothing wrong with such students pursuing their interests. If schools want to develop programs to appeal to such folks, that makes sense.

But how many folks are so motivated? How many pursue advanced education in an effort to find a job after they finish their doctorates?

I was told by the dean of one theology school that the market is simply too full of theology doctorates chasing too few jobs. His school has decided not to offer PhD's. They do offer DMINs for practicing ministers.

This answer makes sense - DL schools could focus on professional doctorates (such as DMIN, DBA, DM, DEng, etc.) that are aimed at mid-career professionals and those that want to learn for the sake of learning. These folks aren't likely to become high end researchers, like the grads of traditional full-time PhD programs. This would certainly clear the air about what is, and isn't, a research doctorate.

Thanks - Andy

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Andy Borchers, DBA
NSU (1996)

 

Burma ? Burma ?

Where the f*** is that ?

Ever heard of Myanmar ?

Just proves what many say about lack of education in the DL world !!!

N.

 

Ever heard of a joke, dude? The name of the country changed, but not all cultural and historical references. Have you ever heard of the Myanmar Road with respect to WWII? No, because it is the Burma Road. (Get it? Burma Roads Scholar...a reference to the American Army engineers who literally had to crash land into the jungle in Burma to build an airstrip so that aircraft could land with equipment to build an access road from the south coast to China.

The University of Burman University College is simply a funny (to me) addition to the Pullfrum joke.

Pushtu...PullFrum (Push to...Pull from): not the greatest joke in the world, but a joke. Lighten up and get some distance larnin.

 

Andy,

Would you mind to post the URL for this newsgroup? I would be interested in looking at the site.

Thanks,
Russell

 

Neil,

I thought we had agreed to be civil in our discourse, or is this the kind of terminology used in a Century University dissertation?

Russell

 

Outside the pre-professional areas, most students are probably motivated largely by love of their subject. What other motivation do all those comparative literature doctoral students have? The philosophers? The art historians and classicists? They know going in that their chances of finding a tenure track position are not good.

Sure they are all going to say that they want to teach. What else are they going to say? But anyone who has ever been a philosophy student knows that the most uncomfortable (and inevitable) question that you will be asked is: "What are you going to do with your degree?"

Now factor in that for every one of these people there are probably two or more people who backed out of pursuing a humanities doctorate because they couldn't really justify spending the better part of a decade as a graduate student scholar-monk, all probably for nothing. They had to be realistic. But the desire and motivation are still there if the cost and sacrifice could ever be rationalized.

Nobody is saying that there should be, or can be, large numbers of universities serving this market. But there certainly should be one or two.

I am claiming that you would be very surprised how successful such a program would be. (A great many of the doctoral program questions on degreeinfo. concern these kind of subjects, especially theology for some strange reason.)

If an area of study is to have any value at all, it must have a value that transcends the professoriate's desire to reproduce itself.

If that isn't true for theology, then Tertullian was right that Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem, and most theology departments probably should disband because they are irrelevant to understanding man's relationship with God.

I don't understand that at all. It might make sense to you, but it doesn't to me.

Are you suggesting that Ph.D.s are an inappropriate degree for distance education to offer? Are you saying that professional doctorates are appropriate degree for people who want to do advanced study and research in a scholarly field but who probably aren't primarily pursuing a university teaching career?

How in the world is a DBA or a PharmD going to be of any use to somebody interested in classical archaeology or Buddhist philosophy?

Actually, I think that the phrase 'research doctorate' is usually used on this group to refer to something else: (the British-style dissertation-only model.)

But if you are suggesting that research be closed to distance education, I have to disagree in the strongest terms.

I am arguing for the exact opposite. That creative research in small fields where job openings do not match student interest be opened up to include people who are NOT university faculty members. And that distance education provides a viable way to do that, by allowing people to "keep their day jobs".

 

This thread got me to thinking...there IS an American dissertation doctorate in law; it is the J.S.D, or S.J.D. The student takes anywhere from a few post- J.D. classes to an L.L.M. then writes a dissertation of "publishable quality" making an (you guessed it) original contribution to knowlege in the field. VERY few U.S. law professors have this degree. Yet it seems to me that a D/L program for active lawyers might generate considerable interest as an intellectual challenge and for personal satisfaction.
There is only a handful of J.S.D. programs out there and only ONE D/L J.S.D. from Cal Northwest or someplace like that. Completely unaccredited, of course.
Nosborne

 

Bill - It isn't that research is "closed" to distance education, but rather that DL students in many cases lack the resources that traditional grad students have - mainly time to work and faculty attention. It seems reasonable to me that a full-time grad student slaving away for 4-5 years is likely going to do more involved research for a dissertation than a part-time mid-career fellow that works full-time and has a family. The part-timer may have a greater sense of relevance - but he just doesn't have the time. This is especially so in DL programs that are pushing for 3 year graduations.

In my own experience - I know how deep my dissertation (and those of my peers) was. I believe it was appropriate for my degree program and credible. I've been able to publish papers that are peer reviewed from it. But I'm kidding myself if I think that studying part-time (while working and caring for a family) and communicating long distance to my part-time advisor compares to five years of full-time study with close faculty interaction in a full time PhD program.

As for the label - I'm suggesting that one way schools can rationalize the difference between full-time PhD programs and part-time DL efforts is to use a different degree label. As a case in point Case Western (pun intended!) awards two doctorates in management. The PhD is reserved for full-time students that are research focused. The EDM (Executive Doctor of Management) is used for their part-time, mid-career folks.

I honestly don't know what label makes sense in the liberal arts. Business, engineering and theology have labels that work (e.g. DBA, DM, DEng, DMIN).

In like fashion, schools that want to offer doctoral programs to DL students but maintain the image of their full-time offerings, may choose to use a different label. In so doing they can recognize that the DL work is truly terminal and "doctoral" in nature. But they can also maintain a distinction between traditional programs and new DL offerings.

I find it interesting that NSU, UoP, Case and UMUC have all done this with DM and DBA labels. Recently, I've been involved in two schools that attempted to get NCA approval for doctoral programs. One school attempted to get a PhD and was "shot down". The other went for a DM and got it. I suspect that NCA of late is taking a harder line on what constitutes a PhD.

Thanks - Andy

 

There is at least one other, from the equally unaccredited Heed University.
http://www.heed.edu/degreetj.htm


Bruce

 

Obviously if a distance Ph.D. program is accredited, it needs to meet the normal academic standards for its discipline. It needn't be a "top ten" Nobel prize quality operation, but I would expect the dissertations and other research product produced by its students to compare well with what is produced by at least the low end of regionally accredited residential programs.

As long as the DL program is producing valuable work, I don't know what else can be demanded of it.

If people continue to reject the program despite that, I think that their dismissive attitude towards research conducted non-traditionally is exposed as the prejudice it is.

 

In the FWIW department: I think I remember running across an Australian distance learning/low-residency J.S.D. at one point, but I can't remember where (Sturt, perhaps?).


Cheers,

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Tom Head
www.tomhead.net

co-author, Bears' Guide to the Best Education Degrees by Distance Learning (Ten Speed Press)
co-author, Get Your IT Degree and Get Ahead (Osborne/McGraw-Hill)

 

Oh dear...Heed University offers a J.S.D. for, apparently, not much besides tuition. Is it possible for one school to be even MORE unaccredited than another unaccredited school?
Northwestern California University School of Law at least enjoys BPPVE state approval and its J.D. grads regularly pass the California Bar exam.
Nosborne

 

Not really, and that's one of the many pitfalls of unaccredited schools. You can work with a decent unaccredited school, but it doesn't matter if you worked hard, wrote a 1000 page dissertation, or anything else...the end result (degree) is just as worthless as the end result of a less than wonderful school, because they share the same (unaccredited) status in most people's eyes.


Bruce

 

I ran a Yahoo search on Heed University. I was unpleasently surprised...there were LOTS of people in various academic and professional positions claiming degrees from Heed.
Brrr.
Nosborne

 

As one might expect from a school that has been operating since 1970.

Rich Douglas