Doctoral Studies As Educational Industrial Complex

"The doctoral degree in education is shifty and difficult: Sometimes scholarly, sometimes a career ladder, and all times an expression of the affordances and limits of higher education. It transforms identities and, for better or worse, can make us re-examine our relationships to educational institutions. Doctoral Studies as Educational Industrial Complex skillfully interrogates this degree, helping us make sense of its nuance, politics, and potential." - Wayne Au, Dean and Professor, University of Washington Bothell

"From the readable and insightful Foreword by Leonard Cassuto to the reprint of William James' original essay to the agenda-setting introduction by co-editors Heybach and Renn to the wide range of observations by thoughtful contributors, this collection never stops asking the questions about the education doctorate that we are all always asking ourselves. Worth the read if you are (considering) pursuing a doctorate, advising someone who is, or running a program!" - Barbara Stengel, PhD, EdD Program, Professor of the Practice, Vanderbilt Peabody College

"Doctoral education has been declared in crisis so many times that one begins to wonder whether crisis is simply its natural condition, and perhaps its source of vitality. This collection takes William James's 1903 lament about the PhD octopus and asks, with genuine rigor, why the tentacles have only multiplied. The answers are uncomfortable and thorough: market capture, credential inflation, institutional inertia, and now artificial intelligence pressing on what remains of scholarly formation. What holds the volume together is a conviction that matters well beyond the doctorate: that education, at any level, exists to form minds, not to process them. Whether doctoral programs can be rescued from the forces the authors so carefully anatomize is an open question. That the question still needs asking may be the most telling finding of all." - Alexander M. Sidorkin, Professor of Education, California State University, Sacramento

"This wonderful collection of essays uses William James' (1903) metaphor of the Ph.D. Octopus in the examination of the education doctorate, both historically and currently, Throughout the text, authors critically examine the role of doctoral in the field of education, the decades-long debates between the EdD and PhD degrees for educators, and the market influences that challenge higher education today. They address the questions: Why not just one doctorate in education? What kinds of knowledge and identities are created by the doctorate in education? What institutional contexts and environments challenge the doctorate in education? The strength of this carefully organized and well-written volume is its rich exploration of how doctorates in the field of education have been perceived and practiced for over a century. The book as a whole offers a reimagined doctoral education without reducing it to the typical theory vs. practice forms of the doctoral degree. A must read for those involved in education doctoral programs." - Kathleen deMarrais, EdD, Professor, Emerita, Qualitative Research in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia