What inspires someone to pursue an Ed.D. in higher education? Why do they choose that degree over the Ph.D.?
Gudrun Nyunt wanted to know.
“As a faculty member, I’m always curious about what brings our students to our programs: What are they really interested in?” says Nyunt, an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education.
“Obviously, we as faculty set the curriculum. We say, ‘Here’s what we think you should know.’ But, especially with grad programs, I think students really come in wanting to learn certain things,” she adds, “and so I think that having a bit of a better sense of their motivation can help us gear our curriculum and our teaching toward their needs and interests.”
Nyunt invited doctoral students Dawn Brown, Andrea Jensen and Cindi Schaefer to help her research that topic – and their paper, “Motivations to Pursue an Ed.D. in Higher Education,” was published in the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.
Conducting qualitative interviews with 14 recent alumni of the same Ed.D. program yielded findings that “highlighted the complexity of participants’ motivations” and that “indicate that participants’ life circumstances and self-doubts could easily become barriers to program enrollment.”
The article provides valuable insight and information for administrators and faculty who are developing or revamping Ed.D. programs, designing curricula or creating promotional materials and strategies, Nyunt says.
“I think it allows people to beef up some of their marketing materials,” she says.
“It also highlights the importance of personal professional networks and helps us all realize that we need to continue building those networks with administrators in our regions so that they see us and they know about our programs, so when they have these conversations with their supervisees, they’re not just saying, ‘You should get a doctorate,’ but, ‘You should get a doctorate and think about the Ed.D. here,’ ” she adds.
“For me, that’s changed how I think about how we are engaging alumni and how we are making connections regionally. It also makes me – and, hopefully, other people who read this paper – think differently about how we teach these courses. Students are not looking for a light version of a Ph.D.”
A “light version” of a Ph.D.?
Some consider the Ph.D. “where you go if you’re really interested in pursuing an intellectual degree,” Nyunt says, while they regard the Ed.D. as “this degree people need so they can advance.”
“I remember when I was thinking about doctoral studies; people told me, ‘Don’t just go into it to get the degree. You’ve got to love learning and you’ve got to love doing research, or you’re not going to make it through,’ and there’s a lot of talk about the importance of internal motivation to help you get through,” she says.
“On the other hand, the Ed.D. is sometimes perceived as kind of an easier degree – but the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate has done a lot around dispelling these myths,” she adds. “The Ed.D. is not just a Ph.D.-light. It stands on its own and has value as a degree for a practitioner.”
Meanwhile, the interviews revealed surprises.
“What was interesting to me was that a lot of Ed.D. alumni talked about intellectual curiosity and internal motivations that were driving them to want to be back in a classroom, wanting to engage in intellectual conversations, saying they missed that because they hadn’t been able to do that,” she says.
“There’s sometimes this perception that student just get this degree because they need those three letters behind their name to get the next promotion – and we definitely had a couple alumni who approached it that way – but that was really the minority of participants.”
Others talked about choosing the Ed.D. route because they thought it would require less work with statistics.
“A lot of students come into these programs with some imposter syndrome,” Nyunt says.
“They’re just worried about doing research because it’s not something they’ve done before, or it’s not something they’ve seen themselves doing, and they’re saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do the Ph.D. The Ed.D. sounds more manageable,’ ” she adds, “which, in some ways, is funny, because we require one statistics course or at least one kind of quantitative research course. The same was true of my Ph.D. program.”
Nyunt and her team also heard their interviewees speak about “just how powerful their personal and professional networks were” in the decision to return to school.
Equally influential were the words of trusted mentors: You are the kind of person I would anticipate is going to get a doctorate one day. It’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when.
“Some of them were first-generation and had never seen themselves going into a doctoral program,” Nyunt says. “These personal and professional networks pushed many of them to consider the Ed.D. and then actually moving through it.”
For Brown, Jensen and Schaefer, the collaboration provided learning on two fronts: the actual results of the study and the behind-the-scenes methods of scholarship.
Research can seem like “this mysterious process,” Nyunt says, and diving in boosts confidence through gathering, analyzing and narrowing evidence.
“When I started thinking about this, I also had a couple students who had reached out and said they were interested in gaining some research experience and doing some projects so they would feel more comfortable going into the dissertation,” the professor says.
“Doing this allowed them to see what to do,” she adds. “You look at your data; you code it; you make sense of it; you try to figure out themes. It’s a messy process at times, and that’s OK. You work through it, and you try to figure out what all of this means.”
Nyunt also knew Ed.D. students would make perfect teammates.
“I enjoy mentoring – that’s part of why I’m a faculty member because I like teaching and I like mentoring – and this gives me a chance to teach and mentor in a different way than I do in the classroom,” she says.
“It just made sense for me to involve them in this project because it also is something they’re interested in. It gave them a chance to reflect on their own motivations for going into the program and if what they’re getting out of the program aligns with those initial expectations of with things they hadn’t thought about. That self-reflectivity will hopefully prepare them more for applying what they learned to their own practice.”
Brown, assistant chair of Curricular Affairs and assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, appreciated the invitation.
“Dr. Nyunt piqued my interest in educational research, and her record of research and scholarly activities compelled me to conduct research with her,” Brown says.
“I was also able to effectively utilize the knowledge and skill regarding the qualitative research process that Dr. Nyunt taught me in her courses,” she adds, “and our research on motivations to pursue an Ed.D. will positively impact how Ed.D. programs consider contextual factors, such program flexibility, characteristics of faculty and marketing materials when attracting and retaining prospective students.”
Schaefer, dean of Early College at Rock Valley College, found that confidence that Nyunt had hoped to provide.
“It allowed me to get my feet wet with the entire process before I began my dissertation,” Schaefer says. “It was almost like a roadmap had been laid out for me, and it made my dissertation process much easier. I also learned that I truly enjoy the process of research, including doing interviews, analyzing data and forming conclusions.”
She also is confident that the research will benefit universities.
“This research shines a light on why folks look to complete an Ed.D., and gives those in leadership roles an opportunity to reevaluate if the programs are truly meeting the needs of the student,” Schaefer says. “I think it will be easier for those who administer Ed.D. programs to tweak the programs to meet the unique needs of Ed.D. students, most of whom have multiple identities, whether full-time employees, parents, guardians, caretakers for elderly loved ones or a combination of all of the above.”
