Faculty Senate approves Jones School Business Ph.D.
The Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management joined the ranks of other research institutes on campus when the Faculty Senate approved a business Ph.D. program last Wednesday.
The new Ph.D. will provide research opportunities for undergraduates and boost the ranking of the business school, Jones School Dean William Glick said.
Management professor P.B. Seetharaman said having a business Ph.D. would help faculty further their research.
“Academic research is what we do here as tenure-track faculty at a business school,” Seetharaman said. “Having a doctoral program will further improve the quality of our research life and strengthen the research culture of the school.”
Glick said having the new Ph.D. program will also help the Jones School recruit quality faculty and make Rice more competitive among nationally ranked universities.
“Every other top university has a business Ph.D. except Rice,” Glick said. “And some rankings take into account whether or not you have a business Ph.D. It’s hard to move forward if you don’t have a Ph.D.”
Adding a Ph.D. has been considered for several years, Seetharaman said. The Faculty Senate took action last year to approve his drafted Ph.D. proposal.
New leadership under Dean Glick helped spur the creation of the business Ph.D, Seetharaman said.
“We did not see the absence of a doctoral program as something that would last forever,” Seetharaman said. “I said to the dean, ‘Come on! Let’s get this going. Let’s do this.’ It was an integral part of [Glick’s] mission.”
Seetharaman also said many business faculty recruits consider whether or not a college has a doctoral business program.
Baker College junior Megan Hermance said the Jones School’s business Ph.D. is an exciting step.
“We have a really good Industrial/Organizational Psychology department,” Hermance said. “It makes sense we’d have a business Ph.D. because we’re already doing research in business.”
Seetharaman said he wanted to emphasize that the Ph.D. would be different from the Master of Business Administration degree currently offered by the Jones School.
An MBA is a professional management degree, and students in the program train to become managers. A business Ph.D. is a research degree, and students in the program train to become academic researchers who teach MBA students.
The majority of the coursework for a Ph.D. student would consist of economics, psychology and statistics classes, while an MBA student’s coursework would be entirely from the business school.
“You can’t think of Ph.D. student as an MBA student who hangs around for a couple years and writes a dissertation,” Seetharaman said. “A [business] Ph.D. is not an MBA plus a doctoral dissertation; an MBA is not a Ph.D. lite. They’re apples and oranges.”
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