UT Tyler PhD (HRD) - AACSB Accreditation and the Job Search

Hello all,

I was exploring the possibility of going back to school and pursuing my PhD in Human Resources development from the University of Texas at Tyler.

An academic colleague expressed concern that I’d have trouble securing a tenure track faculty appointment with a PhD from a program like this due to the lack of AACSB accreditation. It should be noted their college of business is accredited but the actual PhD program is not.

Will I have issues getting hired in the future with this type of degree? I hope to stay working in industry for the duration of the degree program and hoped to find employment afterward as an assistant professor of management at a smaller four year college.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice you might offer!

 

I would venture to say your colleague is correct to an extent. If you want to teach at a large state school then an AACSB accredited PhD is pretty much a requirement. The smaller state schools will often times state they they require a PhD with one from an AACSB program preferred but ACBSP accepted.

All that said, I would recommend, at the minimum a PhD from an ACBSP program but I would really push for you to get one from an AACSB program.

 

I don't know what your academic friend's talking about. I didn't know the AACSB accredited individual degree programs; to my knowledge, they only accredit biz schools or schools of accountancy. That's it, least so far as I know. Further, I've don't recall seeing an ad for an academic job on Higher Ed Jobs or the job listings on the Chronicle of Higher Ed (the two biggies for finding academic jobs) that said anything other "PhD from AACSB-accredited institution required", and even if one said "AACSB-accredited PhD required by time of appointment", I'd interpret that as synonymous with having a PhD from an AACSB-accredited school.

I've taught full time (hence my pompous nom de plume) at an AACSB-accredited business school for over a decade (so it's not like I'm a total babe in the woods in this stuff) and I'm willing to bet that if the chair of HR were searching for a prof and you threw in a CV, the most the head of the search committee would do is take a quick look on the AACSB site and see if UT-Tyler was on the list, and soon as they saw it (and it's there, I checked), they'd think "Fine, they're good".

I'm been in this gig for a while and dealt with AACSB reaccreditation audits, so I think I know what I'm talking about, but if your friend who's an academic knows something I don't, I'll stand corrected. But I sure would like to see the proof of this specific degree program accreditation thing.

Biggest thing you need to do, if you want an academic job, is start doing research and presenting at academic HR conferences. Get known by people, other profs and dept chairs who go there (usually just the profs, most of the chairs spend their time surfing the net in their offices, ahem) and present. Maybe get some pubs in academic journals. Then, when you finally have slogged through that PhD, you're likely to get an offer, provided you haven't made a buffoon of yourself at the conferences (that said, we often do when we get a few beers under our belt--e.g., the academic who wrote one of the textbooks I use ran into me at the last conference during one of the parties and he was three sheets to the wind, as they say, I was half wondering if he was going to fall off the big riverboat we were on at the time--so I guess we all make buffoons of ourselves at the conferences, we're academics--i.e., only partially-grown up children).

 

I love this! I’ve always thought they accredited schools and not programs! That makes me feel so much better and really gets me excited to start! It’ll be a huge challenge but I’ve got a pretty awesome support system.

 

Oh sure, excited now. But you'll be wanting to burn me in effigy if they accept you, once you get going in this and all your free time's taken up and your golf game (or whatever you do) falls to pieces because you have no time to play anymore because you decided you just had to pursue a grad degree while working full time, and then you forget your children's birthdays and your anniversary and you're always stressed, like always that feeling you got back in undergrad right before finals week, and it never seems to go away, and then wife won't mate with you because you're never around and she just wants a little quality time--I mean she married YOU, not a GRAD SCHOOL for goodness sakes!--because even when you are around, you're not around because you always have that blank look like you're thinking of something else, not her, and it's because you are thinking of something else, maybe multivariate statistics--but definitely not her. Do I sound like someone who's done the grad degree thing with family before, maybe someone who's pursuing a fourth degree right now at a distance while working full time in academia, and dealing with this stuff? Be careful what you wish for, my good friend!

 

I would suggest checking the present opportunities in HR and do a sample of schools in areas where you want to work and see what are the requirements:

https://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/search.cfm?JobCat=203

Not all the jobs require an AACSB accredited doctorate but there is a correlation between AACSB accreditation and salary expectations. Most highly paid positions require an AACSB accredited doctorate in my opinion.

 

Dead on right. If you want to do the big university thing, exactly. Everyone who has a tenure-track or tenured slot in my b-school (and there are about 100) have a doctorate from an AACSB school. The only exception would be if someone had a terminal degree that was from an overseas equivalent, from a B&M university like Heriot-Watt EBS or UNISA. I assume they'd hire the right candidate from such a place because that's the way the job descriptions are written, and for some positions (such as profs of accountancy, where we've had a number of searches fail and they're getting increasingly desperate), they're bending the rules more each year.

 

There is huge difference in salary, a business faculty position at a small non AACSB accredited school might pay 50 to 70K at the assistant professor level while AACSB accredited schools start at 110K.
The OP should consider switching to an AACSB accredited school if the salary is a concern. AACSB accredited charge a fortune for tuition and most are residential five year programs. It is not very likely than an AACSB accredited school would hire someone with a distance degree from a low profile school.

 

Yes, big difference in pay. I have a colleague who used to teach with his master's-only at a little sectarian college. Made $44K a year. He went back to school, got an AACSB doctorate, and came back into academia 3 years later (brilliant guy, got it in only 3 years) and now makes > $150K a year teaching accounting. He had a friend at the same time who went to a non-AACSB accredited school to get a doctorate with an accounting emphasis. I'm not talking a junk school, either, but a really legit one, so far as non-AACSB goes, Nova Southeastern. My colleague's friend found a decent job, paying $80K-ish a year at a non-AACSB college, but of course, it's roughly half what my colleague makes, and really not much for a tenured accounting prof.

Of course, some people might not care much about all that, as they don't want to hustle through the hallways of a b-school with 4,000+ students alone. They'd rather teach at a place that has less students than that in their entire college. My wife's parents did that highly selective liberal arts thing and though they didn't make the big bucks, they did have some nice fringes, such as taking fully paid Euro or Far Eastern trips with groups of students at least every other year. They retired recently. They had nice lives, lots of friends in different disciplines, nice little community (rather than the little discipline-specific silos we put ourselves into here at the bigger universities) lived in a nice Victorian near campus where they could walk every day, no publication requirements with their chair getting that strained look saying "We need more from you". Almost makes me want to do that thing myself. If the wife and I could find a place where we could both teach and tip the annual income over $100K, just might be able to swing it. Oh well, maybe someday.

 

What is boils down to is AACSB is the gold standard for business accreditation. Under certain circumstances could I see someone getting a doctorate at a non-AACSB school but other than a select few, if it is not AACSB I see no point other than personal fulfillment.