Hello All -
I wanted to hear if any of you had a recommendation for an online and affordable PhD program. I would like to focus on public health, public policy, public administration, epidemiology, or something similar. I would like an institution that is reputable, but it doesn’t have to be a top-tier or ivy by any means. I just would like to stay away from a degree-mill institution.
Any suggestions?
In my opinion, a valid, good Ph.D. cannot be earned online. A Ph.D. is all about research and researching is all about collaboration. Frankly, I highly doubt any good college offers online PhDs. Look into on campus PhDs.
This is an odd request for several reasons.
First, like @mademoiselle2308 already mentioned, good and reputable PhDs cannot really be earned online. This is particularly true if you want to use the PhD to enter a field for which it is typically required, like academia. It’s a research degree and a mentored degree, and both of those designations require close, personal, on-the-ground relationships with faculty and other students in the program. The coursework is really only secondary or tertiary to the program in and of itself.
Secondly, though, you say that “I would like to focus on public health, public policy, public administration, epidemiology, or something similar.” If you have a list this broad for what you would like to focus on, I strongly suspect that you don’t have a research question/focus narrow enough to be successful in a doctoral program.
Now, that’s not universally true. For example, I had a research area that could be approached from several different angles and I was interested in non-academic positions, so my plan was to apply to PhD programs in psychology, epidemiology/public health, and one or more in social policy. But they were very specific PhD programs that I knew addressed the area in which I was interested and offered the opportunity for interdisciplinary study across departments. It wasn’t that I was broadly interested in those fields and just looked for programs in them widely; it’s that I had a specific research question/agenda I wanted to address, and specifically found programs in those areas that used a theoretical and methodological approach I wanted to use to address it.
And so it should be with you. Do you have a research program/question/problem that you want to address in your doctoral program and your career? And what would you like to do with your PhD? If you want to teach in academia, the department you earn your doctoral degree will be important, because to a certain extent it will determine where you can teach. (Sociology PhDs could theoretically teach in any one of the departments you listed, but a public policy PhD would have a difficult time getting hired in a sociology department.)