The University of Victoria is considering offering a new type of doctorate that students could finish in three years while working in a full-time job — a move that could also potentially help fill university coffers.
University senators overwhelmingly voted in favour of the move on Friday.
“I appreciate that in some corners of campus, this feels like a new concept — and it may be for some — but this is a very, very well-established thing,” UVic dean of graduate studies Robin Hicks said at the senate meeting at the Jamie Cassels Centre.
Traditional PhD programs far outnumber professional PhDs in Canadian academia — a 2012 survey found fewer than four per cent of doctoral degrees offered in Ontario were professional doctorates.
But professional PhD programs, which are common in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, have been on the rise in sa国际传媒.
Sarah Tracy, research manager at Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto-based educational consultancy, said academics are often resistant to “anything that feels like it waters down the research rigour or the academic freedom or integrity of the work that they do.”
But Canadian universities are under enormous pressure to find alternate sources of revenue amid challenges such as decreasing funding from provincial governments, she said.
UVic cut its operating budget by $13 million last year to address declining revenue as a result of reduced international student enrolment. It also made cuts in 2023, when the annual budget was $505 million.
Tracy said professional doctorates can be lucrative for universities because the tuition is often paid by an employer.
Other professional degrees such as master of business administration have long been considered “money-maker” programs at universities, but enrolments in those have been decreasing of late, she said.
Companies that have “deeper pockets than most learners in their 30s” will often pay for an employee to obtain a professional doctorate and spend a few years conducting research tailored to corporate needs, she said.
Professional doctorates are also partly a response to the growing number of PhD-holders who end up working in the private sector rather than academia, said Tracy, who graduated with a PhD from the University of Toronto in 2016, around the same time that academic jobs in the humanities dried up across North America.
“The academic job market is atrocious,” she said.
Hicks told UVic senators that professional doctorate degrees could generate “substantial revenue through market tuition,” which academic departments could use to subsidize their PhD programs.
PhD programs often run at a loss in sa国际传媒, as tuition fees do not cover full program costs, and are often reliant on grant money.
Professional doctorates are most commonly offered in the fields of engineering, business and education.
UVic’s first professional doctorate degree, a three-year program focused on leadership in large, complex engineering projects, could be implemented as soon as this September, after senators voted in favour.
Engineering and computer science dean Mina Hoorfar said the doctorate, which would be the first of its kind offered in sa国际传媒, draws on models that have been successful in other parts of the world.
UVic documents show the degree is aimed at working professionals with at least seven years of experience in the field, and would be taught in a series of week-long conferences while students continue to work full-time.
Tuition cost has not been made public.
The proposed degree was endorsed by representatives from sa国际传媒 Hydro, the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Vancouver Island Engineering Society, and a number of private-sector companies.
It still needs to be approved by the university’s board of governors and sa国际传媒’s Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Skills.
There isn’t much research on the usefulness and impact of Canadian professional doctorates.
Statistics sa国际传媒 does not track educational outcomes for professional doctorates separately from other PhDs.
A 2017 Conference Board of sa国际传媒 report notes that the lack of standardization of professional-doctorate programs in sa国际传媒 makes the degree hard to evaluate.
However, the report said Royal Roads University’s doctor of social sciences program, which is mostly online-based, received a positive external review in 2015 and is showing a potential path to keeping doctoral programs “relevant and responsive” to the modern age.
In 2018, Royal Roads introduced a second professional doctorate degree in business administration, in addition to its existing MBA program.
Royal Roads, which is projecting a financial shortfall — a $3.6-million difference between revenue and spending in 2024-25 — is plugging its deficit by tapping into the university’s financial reserves.
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