<p>Emeraldkitty, the abstract was interesting in showing the lack of a consensus from the university standpoint.</p>
<p>I have a professional degree, not in education, worked at two top ten research universities for a number of years, and gained a great deal of experience working directly with PhDs in several different departments. My life since then has largely been as a K-12 activist with a lot of experience working at local and statewide levels on educational policy issues. </p>
<p>My impression from working with many people with EdD degrees is that the intellectual rigor apparently required to obtain one is often too little. I haven’t met many physicists, sociologists, or economists who struggle to understand and use statistics, but I’ve encountered far to many EdD folks whose eyes glaze over the moment statistics come into play. I’ve also read far too much of what passes for research and analysis in education journals and found it to be markedly weak from a research design and analysis standpoint. I don’t know why this is my experience, but the exceptions have been few and far between. </p>
<p>If the EdD is a professional degree, I’d say it does a remarkably poor job of preparing people for leadership roles they then undertake. I have personally known five people who finished EdD degrees while I worked with them, and none took longer than four years even though they were all working full time. Not many PhDs get earned with that level of work. The institutions granting EdD degrees also seem to include a number that aren’t by any stretch of the imagination research universities. Not quite diploma mills, but not respected institutions in some cases. </p>
<p>Many (most?) of the EdD folks I know work for institutions or governmental entities where their pay is largely determined by your placement on a salary schedule that reflects years of service and highest degree earned, and a significant number of people seem to pursue the degree because of the salary benefits rather than for some intrinsic motivation for pursuit of knowledge. </p>
<p>There may be fabulous EdD programs out there, and I wish that the graduates of some of them worked in ed policy around here.</p>