Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/61375
"PART-TIME PH.D. CANDIDATES CAN SUCCEED IN AND SUPPORT DOCTORAL PROGRAMS AS WELL AS THOSE WHO STUDY FULL-TIME." potential Ph.D. candidates have been successful in business, govern- ment, or the military, and now desire to share their work-related knowledge with students. However, at their stage of life, they may be married and have older children. They must finance mortgages, college tuition, and perhaps even long-term care for their parents. These businesspeople cannot sup- port their families on a graduate assistant's stipend. As a result, most are refused entrance into doctoral programs time and to cease his outside work activities. Financially, his only option was to leave the program. He was a promising candidate, lost because of a myopic policy. It was a policy established with no evidence that part-time students were somehow less worthy than full-time candidates. We must consider that many faculty created by allowing part-time candidates would far exceed the number of faculty from doctoral programs for executives. Graduates from part-time Ph.D. programs would be fully research-qualified and ready for the rigors of academic study. And although part-time can- didates may not teach initially, I believe there are ways for them to gain teaching experience that would allow for their working schedules. Commission neglects the issue of part-time Ph.D. study, it advocates doctoral programs for executives, programs that by the Commission's own admission are rare. Moreover, I believe we should not encourage Ph.D. education that de-emphasizes research, as many executive doctoral programs propose. I suspect that the number of new because universities refuse to allow their part-time participation. We can't even gather statistics on them—on their education, their income, their work experience— because they are simply turned away without consideration. At the same time that the Alternative No. 2: Abandon policies that prevent an institution from hiring its own graduates. Many institutions that grant doctoral degrees do not hire their own grad- uates directly from their own Ph.D. programs. Some refuse to do so indefinitely; others require graduates to obtain considerable experience elsewhere before their applications are considered. This policy places an undue limitation on the pool of tal- ent available for hire and perpetuates the belief that institutions are merely cultivating talent for the benefit of their competitors. I have known promising individu- schools guarantee employment to their graduates. But when filling their faculty positions, schools should give their own graduates as much consideration as they give external candidates. Let each indi- vidual's merits rule the hiring deci- sions. Even if graduates are not hired, the potential for future stabil- ity could be a factor in their deci- sion to enter a doctoral program. Policies that deny graduates that opportunity create artificial—and unnecessary—barriers. While most of the recommenda- als who did not apply for entry to a Ph.D. program because they knew there was no chance that they could be hired by the university in their hometowns. They knew that upon graduation they would have to dis- place their families to gain employ- ment elsewhere. Not surprisingly, many chose not to pursue Ph.D. degrees at all. Of course, I don't advocate that tion as a doctorally qualified profes- sor with pride and a touch of irony. If I had decided to pursue a Ph.D. in business even a year or two later, I, too, would have been turned away at the door. s tions of the Commission are sound, Ph.D.-granting institutions need to consider these two alternative solu- tions. They represent long-standing policies among doctoral degree- granting institutions and are signifi- cant impediments to Ph.D. produc- tion. There are few legitimate argu- ments for such policies—they are simply the remnants of tradition. In my own case, I view my posi- z Joe Joseph is the Dana Professor of Accounting at the University of Tampa's John H. Sykes College of Business in Tampa, Florida. BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2004 55