Value of Professional Doctorates (w/Capstones)

I know we have a lot of discussion of the utility of a professional doctorate, but it's usually in the context of a specific program. I'm curious what people think of the professional doctorates with capstone projects.

Of course, I hold precisely zero doctorates and others have worked hard for their degrees whether a PhD, EdD or DHA. I think that if you finish your program with a piece of scholarly research, whether applied or theoretical, you have met the requirements of a doctorate by being able to produce research.

On the other hand, what are the outcomes for graduates of these programs that have capstones? Are the graduates qualitatively different from those who haven't graduated? In my mind, if you're not producing research then a doctorate hasn't met its basic reason for existing. I'd be interested in hearing others views and changing my perspective.

 

You don't need a PhD to produce research. There are people with bachelor’s and master's degrees who have published. There are also people with PhDs who don't publish either because they didn't land a job in academia, they got lazy after earning tenure, or because they chose not to work in academia. PhDs conducting applied research in industry may or may not publish in academic journals.

I wouldn't tell a scientist working for NASA or a pharmaceutical company that they're not putting their PhD to use, especially when many academic articles are junk and hardly cited. The push for quantity instead of quality is why we have academics being fired for plagiarism, fabricating data, and manipulating results. The scary part is that their work IS often cited. On Reddit, you'll come across PhDs who intentionally chose to work at teaching colleges so that they wouldn't have to deal with the pressure to publish a lot of junk.

There are also a lot of people with DBAs and EdDs publishing. You can often see the author's credentials when doing your literature reviews, and I've cited plenty of EdDs. Or, you can look at a tenure-track professor's bio and see that the ones with EdDs and DBAs are publishing just like a professor with a PhD.

This is only one university, but I was hired to teach a graduate-level course, which requires a doctorate. The director said that he sees no difference between a PhD or any other doctorate. To him, a terminal degree is a terminal degree.

I think it was UT Dallas where I saw quite a few assistant professors who were hired without publications, and most of them had PhDs. I did some reading around and heard this isn't uncommon in the fields of business and economics. These tenure-track business professors are making over $100k as new assistant professors. Some of the non-tenure-track teaching professors in business are making $150k to $200k.

 

Is it an EdD program? If it's a PhD in IT, this would not be a good topic. I recently made a thread about someone who graduated with a PhD in computer science at CapTech. He's a lawyer, and his dissertation was on cybersecurity law. In my opinion, this guy hasn't demonstrated via his education, work experience, or dissertation that he's qualified to teach computer science at the post-secondary level. But, this is CapTech, which is often called a degree mill on Reddit. They have a person with a background in mental health and theology chairing data science and cybersecurity dissertations.

 

Scholarly degree: Prepares you to work as a researcher.
Professional degree: Prepares you to do research in your work.

The more I look at these so-called "capstone projects," the more they look like dissertations without the scholarly emphasis. In other words, they don't test or create theory. Rather, they build upon and advance practice. But the rigor remains. Students still develop an explanation of the phenomenon under study, establish a place for--and significance of--their research, measure, describe, and explain the impact of the results.

A big difference: in a capstone, the researcher often creates the phenomenon under study. For example, let's say I was interested in developing strategic leaders. I might draw upon current methods, ideas, measures, etc., but put them together in a unique way. I'd then launch a pilot of such a program, putting a set of subjects through it, measuring the results. Advancing theory (scholarship)? No. But if I told you I'd decided to combine training, learning, coaching, mentoring, and group facilitation to develop a set of strategic leadership concepts and that my outcomes were significant, you might want to read that.

 

Which was the original argument for the Doctor of Arts degree.

And a lot of them did scholarly dissertations to earn what, at first glance, appears to be a professional doctorate, but instead was a scholarly doctorate with an alternative title. The distinctions can get blurred pretty quickly.

I did far more scholarship in my DSocSci than I did in my PhD. The University of Leicester considers the DSocSci to be a scholarly degree, not a professional one, and demanded an advancement in scholarship (theory testing or theory creation; I did the latter). They also consider the DSocSci equal to, not equivalent to, a PhD.

 

Agree, but universities also differ on what they'll allow. Some of the dissertations for online PhD programs are not advancing theory. They look more like applied research projects. On the other hand, some programs with capstones are not strict on what counts as applied research, or maybe they don't care. Some of the capstones produced could be dissertations in a PhD program.

 

By people utterly unqualified to make that assertion.

 

Some things, they get wrong, but most of their critiques are valid. Because European-style doctorates have no content coursework, they require related master's degrees. CapTech is very "flexible" in what they consider related. That's how someone with an LLM in cyber law can be admitted to a computer science program. They hardly have any full-time faculty, and a large majority of their adjuncts graduated from CapTech. According to a member of Degree Forum who attended CapTech, they don't look at impact factor if you choose the publication option, and you can publish in low-quality journals with high acceptance rates. I can't independently verify that, but Redditors have been looking at the quality of journals that CapTech graduates publish in.

 

It has been suggested that “honest but weak” legitimate schools ought not to be called degree or diploma mills (Reid, 1963, p. 5). We recognize that in common vernacular, especially when criticizing the increasingly commodifed global systems of higher education people will often use one or both terms to refer to low quality-but-legitimately-accredited programs. However, for the purposes of this book, we use the terms degree mill and diploma mill to refer to operations that intentionally provide fake or fraudulent credentials to others. ("Fake Degrees and Fraudulent Credentials in Higher Education" a book published in 2023 by Springer).

 

They're suggesting that the school is dishonest. Accredited colleges and universities can be dishonest i.e. University of North Carolina's athlete and African Studies scandal.

I typically see the federal government use the term "diploma mill" and not "degree mill." A diploma mill, by their definition, is an unaccredited school that requires little to no work. Some states and CHEA use "degree mill." Without a consistent legal definition of what constitutes a degree mill, I think it's pointless to police the term. In that case, common understanding and usage overrides language choices or preferences in publications.

 

I have a professional doctorate (DNP). The doctor of nursing "capstone" is usually to perform a Squire quality improvement project. Which involves applying theoretical knowledge to real-world practice, to enhance healthcare delivery and outcomes.

 

A lot of what gets published looks at real world outcomes. I never understood the either/or mindset. Some published research proposes new theories or tests theories with the goal of those theories being useful to real world applications. Other published research applies those theories and reports real world outcomes.

In criminal justice, for example, one academic could publish an article testing self-control theory. Later, that same academic could publish a paper on how a change in shift length impacted the sleep and performance of officers at a law enforcement agency.

 

Indeed. I love the way Social Media Experts" throw around their definitive expertise calling entities diploma mills. And weigh in with definitive answers on immunology and any number of subjects (they saw at video on YouTube and...)

 

These are mostly tenure-track professors with PhDs. I also, personally, had a biology instructor - meaning that I could verify her education and position - who was highly critical of the quality of science education at Liberty University. Uneducated people aren't the only ones critiquing colleges and universities. Your average person doesn't know to look at journal quality or academic inbreeding.

 

Professors are certainly as capable of having prejudices or biases. I have personally encountered professors who at least several years ago reacted negatively to the idea of a distance learning PhD. The person just matter of factly said, "Oh, so basically you buy your degree".

Similarly, Liberty University is triggering for some people and I have seen any number of people make absolutely stupid and uninformed comments about the school. They critique the academics based on hearsay and the fact that they don't like Jerry Falwell senior or didn't like Jerry Falwell Jr or don't like Evangelical Christianity.

We are human beings and many factors go into the decisions about things. We tend to line up political parties and life in very black and white ways that aligned with other views we have and quite independent of facts. We aren't particularly interested in assessment as much as confirmation bias.

 

Your bias is resulting in you automatically dismissing critiques without knowing what the critiques are or who they're coming from. Treating creation science as a science is a valid critique; it has nothing to do with disliking the Falwells, Liberty's potentially illegal political activities, or Liberty firing whistleblowers. Academic inbreeding at CapTech is a valid critique, and it's not hearsay. Their faculty bios are on their website. Publishing in predatory journals or journals with a near 100% acceptance rate is a valid critique. Admitting dissertation-only doctoral students, who have little to no background in the major, is a valid critique.

 

You are reading a whole lot into my comment. The result is we aren't even on the same sheet since you are arguing about things I am not arguing about (and not too interested in arguing about).

No issues with you or issues.

 

PhD by Publication, where one enrolls as a regular PhD student/candidate with the expectation that one will produce research that is a significant original contribution to knowledge, that is (or can be) published as several peer-reviewed journal articles, seems to have a lot in common with what you're describing. I think this is a common way to earn a PhD outside the USA, but happens less often here.

 

Yes, some people without doctorates publish and some people with doctorates don't publish.

But if the purpose of capstone-based doctorate is not producing research (and it seems to be the case), then what are they for?