Getting there is half the fun

What to do for my Bachelor’s degree was easy: I simply wanted the fastest route to a credible degree so that I’d be eligible to apply for a Master’s degree program.  What to do for my Master’s was easy too: I chose that program around the same time as I chose what to do to complete a Bachelor’s degree, thinking of the two together as sort of two phases of the same plan.

Deciding what to do for doctoral work, however, was a torturous process that took several years and involved a search that literally covered the globe.  Especially after I started working in higher education, I knew I’d want a doctoral degree of some sort, but none of the ones with which I was familiar jumped out at me the way that my other two programs had.

I started by putting together a set of criteria based on my goals and circumstances. 
 

• I knew I wasn’t interested in being a full time university professor, so I didn’t have to stick only to those programs that might make me competitive for the tenure track.  This was actually very liberating, in that otherwise I’d have had to stick to traditional classroom-based programs.
  
  
• I wanted something in Education, IT, or Educational Technology.
  
  
• I knew I wanted to do this as inexpensively as I could, since I’d be racking up student loan debt to make this happen.  For those who don’t have kids, it’s practical to pay for graduate study by taking an assistantship and working for the school in exchange for free tuition and a small stipend.  With my four kids, though, those meager stipends just weren’t going to cut it.
  
  
• I knew I wanted something online.  By this time I was back in the Washington, D.C. area, and while there are some world class schools here, they’re all very expensive, very inconvenient, or both.
  
  
• I didn’t have to worry about doing something international.  I met my wife when I was living in the Caribbean, and eventually we plan to return to Dominica permanently.  While Americans sometimes think the world stops at the border, and find the idea of studying through foreign universities to be strange, or even suspect, in Dominica that’s not the case, so I was at liberty to consider foreign options.

Because of all these points, I started by looking at doctoral programs at South African universities.  Dominica is a member of the (British) Commonwealth, and since South Africa is too I knew that no one in Dominica would think twice about credentials from their universities.  In fact, South Africa has a number of world class universities, including four that routinely make the annual SJTU list of the world’s 500 best.

These universities don’t necessarily offer distance programs as such, but Master’s and doctoral degrees can be earned there without taking courses by conducting laborious research projects that lead to a dissertation that’s even longer than those required by American doctoral programs.  

In addition to several South African universities, I was also attracted to India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University, which in the last year or so has made a concerted effort to reach out to international students who might be interested in a research-only doctoral program.

The financial upside of these sorts of programs was that they are among the best values in higher education on the planet: one can do a complete PhD at a South African university for less than three thousand dollars.  IGNOU is comparable to that as well.  The downside, however, is that often more than one trip to the university might be required, say for colloquia or for an oral or written defense of one’s research.  Given that a trip to either of those countries would cost several thousand dollars, a few required trips would negate the financial advantage.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t also look at American programs.  I considered programs at New Mexico State University, Liberty University, and Dakota State University, among others.  I’ll talk about which ones I considered, why I liked them, and why I didn’t apply to them in later posts.

Nevertheless, after having considered many different programs at many different schools, I thought I had settled on IGNOU, where I planned to do research on perceptions of higher education students in the developing world.

But that’s not what I ultimately decided: eventually I switched gears and decided to do the Doctor of Health Education program at A.T. Still University.  Why the change of heart?  I’ll explain that in the next installment.