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August 24, 2007 > Opinion > Management Ph.D. must meet university standard

Management Ph.D. must meet university standard

By The Rice Thresher Editorial Staff | Thresher Editorial Staff

The Jones Graduate School of Management proposed a doctoral program in management to the Graduate Council last semester (see story, Page 1). While we greatly applaud this step of increasing research on campus, we have a big reservation about the courses associated with the doctorate.

Generally, introducing a doctoral program affects little outside the program’s department — Ph.D. students take most of their classes from their department alone. But the Jones School’s proposal does exactly the opposite: In the typical proposed management Ph.D. student’s schedule, 75 percent of the courses listed are graduate-level courses from departments outside the Jones School, including economics, statistics and political science.

Currently, the relative isolation of the Jones School from the rest of the university permits its admissions office, which will handle management Ph.D. candidate applications, to consider applicants based on the Jones School’s standard — which is markedly lower than the university’s. If management Ph.D. candidates are considered on par with Jones MBA candidates, departments outside the Jones School will suffer the consequences: Lower-caliber graduate students will flow from the Jones School to other university departments, take up space in classes and lower the quality of class discussions. And this will hurt the university.

If management Ph.D. candidates are allowed to take mostly non-Jones School classes, their admissions standards must match those of the rest of the university, and there must be regulations imposed to ensure that those standards are being met. We urge the Faculty Senate to take this issue into account when they consider the proposed doctoral program.

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