Survey Results: Perceptions of For-Profit Higher Education

In a recent survey, I asked participants about their doctoral program experiences. In addition, because so many dissertators are choosing a nontraditional path to earning a doctorate, I asked participants about their perceptions of for-profit universities. The sample so far is still small, but here some topline results.

Most participants agreed…

LoveYourDissertation-Chart 1

However, no one thought

Love Your Dissertation-Chart 2

… and a majority said…

Love Your Dissertation-Chart 3

What do you think?

Are you currently enrolled or have you attended a doctoral program at a U.S. university within the past five years, whether you completed the program or not? Would you tell me about your experiences?

I need more responses to my survey. I hope you will consider taking less than 10 minutes today to answer about 25 quick-click questions to help me with this research project about dissertators’ experiences.

This Google Form will work best on something larger than a smartphone, but it should work on any device. The survey will be open until March 31, 2018.

If you already participated, thank you! Please consider forwarding the survey link to others you think might qualify. I need your help to keep the snowball rolling.

The fine print

I am not selling anything with this survey. There is no intent to deceive you. There is no risk. I hope to use the data I collect to write an article about academics’ experiences with doctoral programs.

No personal information is required from you. All your responses are confidential and anonymous. At the end of the survey, you can indicate if you would be willing to take part in further research (a 15-minute phone or Skype call). If you are selected for further research, you will receive a $10 gift card (Target or Trader Joe’s, your choice) via postal mail or email.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact me at carol [at] carolbooton.com. Thanks for your help with this project!

Are you ready to turn your dissertation into a journal article?

Even if you haven’t finished your doctoral research and manuscript—in fact, even if you haven’t started yet—it is not too soon to think strategically about the journal articles that could emerge from your dissertation.

If you attend(ed) a traditional (by traditional I mean a public or private nonprofit) university, you probably already know that you need to publish your research in journals, the sooner (and more reputable) the better.

As a nontraditional dissertator at an online for-profit university, I did not know this. I received no guidance on how to position my research strategically for my future academic career. I now know I was fortunate simply to have a Chair who gave me good feedback and didn’t disappear halfway to the finish line. I’ve since learned, somewhat resentfully, that dissertators at traditional universities often publish articles long before they get to their oral defense.

The dissertation and doctoral degree are not the end of our academic career—they are just the beginning. The dissertation we deliver to the world is a repository of data and knowledge we mine in subsequent months and years to reap the rewards of our long laborious hours of research and writing. No matter what type of institution we attend or attended, we need to publish. But should we convert our dissertation into a book? Journal articles? Or both?

Publish as a book or as a journal article—or both

Printing and binding your dissertation  may make it look like a book, but this is not what academic experts mean when they suggest you publish in book form. Publishing your dissertation in book form is an intentional process, planned before you start writing. For example, some traditional dissertators earn degrees in fields in which their dissertations become textbooks. They pitch their projects to publishers long before they start collecting data, sometimes even before their proposals are approved. They plan their projects with their undergraduate audiences (and prospective publishers) in mind.

Intentionally positioning my dissertation as a future textbook never entered my consciousness (and I’m pretty sure it would not have happened unintentionally, given my lack of expertise as a novice researcher). Most of us nontraditional dissertators will struggle through to the finish line and wake up a couple years later wondering what we can do to pummel our dissertation into some sort of shape that could earn us some money to pay back our student loans.

Your dissertation may not translate easily into a book, and that is a topic for another day. However, I have no doubt you can get at least two journal articles from your massive tome, maybe more. Journal articles are typically short, focusing on one aspect of the research study, adhering to a specific structure, and targeting a wider audience than your dissertation would likely reach.

Four steps to publishing a journal article

Four steps: Choose a journal. Figure out the focus of your article. Write it according to the journal’s guidelines, and submit it. Voila. It’s (almost) that simple. Then prepare to wait. Before you start writing a journal article, read all four of my recommended steps, because like a lot of academic writing, this is an iterative process. (That means we often have to run in circles, sweating and grunting and maybe flapping our arms a little bit, before we end up at our destination.)

1. Choose a journal

If you have been at this scholarly thing for a while, you no doubt know thousands of academic journals exist, online and in print. You probably already know some are better than others. Some subscriptions cost a small fortune for a densely written quarterly than can’t bend to fit in your mailbox. Others exist only online, in the Wild, Wild West of academic publishing where anything goes and articles might not even be given issue numbers, let alone volume numbers. Some are in English, some not so much. Some are riddled with typos, formatting faux pas, and unsupported statements that scream not peer-reviewed. You must be careful when you seek prospective journals.

Go back through your dissertation references and make a list of articles that were useful to you. Which seemed the most reputable? Were the authors affiliated with respectable schools? Read what the online world has to say about the journal and its publisher. Look at their websites. Peruse the author submission guidelines. Here’s a hint: If they want you to pay a fee to submit or to publish, strike them from your list of potential journals. You will not be paid for your article, but neither should you pay. Find the journals that have strong peer-review procedures. Aim for top-tier journals in your field, but don’t turn up your nose at second- and third-tier journals. We all start somewhere.

After you have a list of five to ten possible journals, jump to step 2 and find the focuses of your first two articles. Then come back here to step 1 and narrow down your choice to journals that seem like the best fit for your ideas. (Remember, we don’t submit a manuscript to more than one journal at a time.) Start with a top-tier journal. Maybe you will receive a revise-and-resubmit. Awesome! If the reviewers reject your article, revise based on their feedback (if you receive any feedback), and try another journal.

2. Find the focus

I’ve edited a number of life sciences dissertations that were organized into three journal articles, each focused on one aspect of the research project. This format is not the norm in social science fields like business, education, and psychology, in which most dissertators follow a traditional five chapter format. However, if you are required to follow the three-article format, you are home free in the article-submission race. You write your dissertation with the goal of submission in mind, submit your three chapters, and bing bang boom (tech-speak for winning!), you are published.

If not, however, no worries. You can extract at least two articles from your dissertation, no matter what format it follows. The first one will focus on some aspect of the topic. The second will focus on the methodology. Here’s my story.

Topic. My topic was academic quality in for-profit colleges, so logically, my first article focused on that topic. However, when I tried to convert my massive tome to an article, I bogged down to my eyebrows in data. With a firm 7,000-word limit set by the journal I sought, how could I convey the nuances of my findings, plus include a brief introduction, literature review, and list of references? I quickly became overwhelmed.

Finally, after some pondering, I realized that I could report one set of responses regarding one group and draw reasonable conclusions about that one group. Maybe someday I will write about the other groups and themes that emerged. For this first article, I reported what faculty members thought owners and administrators of vocational colleges should do to improve academic quality at their schools. I guess it worked, because after a round of revisions, the article was published by a reputable journal.

Method. My second article, in review now for about a billion years, focused on methodology. In my dissertation, I used rich pictures to gather faculty perceptions of academic quality. I thought, hmm, rich pictures is visually appealing, just the type of research a not-too-fancy online journal might be happy to publish. My submission hasn’t been rejected yet, so we’ll see.

It was hard at first to shift my focus from writing about the conclusions of my research (topic) to writing about the actual process of the research (method), but once I found the angle, I saw other possibilities related to methodology—for example, recruiting hard-to-access participant populations and using web surveys to collect demographic data—that could become future articles.

3. Write the article

Once you have the focus of the article, the rest is just a matter of cramming it all into the format required by the journal to which you plan to submit. Don’t make the mistake of writing your article before you know what journal might accept it. Waste of time. Keep the journal requirements in mind while you write.

Many journals in the social sciences refer authors to the guidelines in the American Psychology Association (APA) Publication Manual. Pay attention to formatting guidelines and word limits. If you have tables and figures, make sure you place them where the journal wants them, with appropriate captions. Be aware of the rules about submitting your name and contact information. (For example, please do not add your name in a running head).

In short, read the journal’s submission requirements and follow them carefully. Don’t give them any reason to reject you before they have had a chance to read your scintillating prose.

4. Submit the article to the journal

Submission usually happens online and involves creating an account with the journal, submitting your Word or pdf file, and then waiting. I hear three months is typical. If you don’t hear something in a month, send an email to the editor, asking for an update.

If you receive an invitation to revise and resubmit, that is great news. You will most likely receive feedback from several reviewers. You can take or leave what they suggest (I suggest you take their suggestions seriously). They will have some valuable questions and insights that will make your work stronger. If something was confusing to them, it will confuse your eventual readers. We don’t want that. So do your best to follow their recommendations. Then resubmit. After a while, you’ll see a proof of your document, with many comments from the publisher’s proofreader, catching the embarrassing typos and citation errors you didn’t.

Eventually, you’ll sign a document giving the publisher the rights to your article, and next thing you know, you’re published. You can add the doi to your CV and email your mom and everything. If you went to a traditional university, you’ve already done this a few times, old news for you, moving on. However, if you went to a nontraditional university, like me, this is a little moment to celebrate before taking a deep breath and doing it all over again. And again.

You can do it

You worked hard on your dissertation… or you are working hard… or you will work hard, if you aren’t done yet. Whatever stage you have achieved in your doctoral journey, you owe it to yourself—you owe it to the world—to bring your findings to the larger community. If you were strategic (and went to the right schools), you likely planned your publishing career before you ever wrote a word of your dissertation. For those of us who are a bit late to the party, don’t worry, we’ll catch up.

================================================

If you are at the proposal stage and running into some obstacles, maybe I can help. Check out my book.

Print version
Kindle version 

Love your dissertation, or not, but get it done: The world is depending on you

Every December I find myself reflecting on what I have accomplished during the year and what I have left undone. I’m coming to understand that tasks undone represent wasted life energy. In fact, these unfinished tasks affect my experience of the world, maybe even the world itself.

What happens when I pursue a goal, start working toward it, but quit before I finish it? The longer I neglect the task, the more the energy it took to start it fades away. Good ideas lose their luster simply because I failed to nurture them. In a way, you could call it money left on the table.

Should we finish everything we start?

Is everything we start worth finishing? I’m trying to figure that out. For example, when I was a teenager, I would start sewing a garment, make a total mess of it, realize the endeavor was hopeless, and consign the pile of abused fabric to the trash in disgust. What might I have learned, what might have I created from the debacle if I had kept working at it, seeking creative ways to turn my mistakes into something useful? Back in the 1970s, fashion trends being that they were, if nothing else, I could have made several pairs of hot pants.

Purposes of higher education

Today I am reflecting on the purposes of higher education. Reasons for attending graduate school must be as varied as the number of graduate students. If I crank up the Wayback Machine to 2005, I remember my reasons for pursuing a doctorate: to earn more money, to increase my employability, and I confess, to gain prestige. At the time, these seemed like valid reasons to embark upon the doctoral journey.

Naturally, over the course of the eight years it took me to earn the Ph.D., my reasons evolved. For instance, it gradually became clear my assumptions that I would earn more money and be more desirable to my employer were unfounded. My employer did not care; indeed, just as I was finishing the degree, my employer laid me off. In addition, after many long hours completing busywork assignments apparently designed to weed out serious doctoral candidates from the looky-loos, my (secret) goal of gaining prestige started looking increasingly ridiculous. I had to find new reasons to continue the doctoral torture, I mean, journey.

Psychic cost of quitting

Eventually I came to understand that abandoning the project before the “phinish line” would have psychic consequences for me, maybe for the world. Here’s one way to think of it: We all contribute something to the world party. I bring cups, you bring plates, we all have our gifts, and together, we create an awesome picnic. What happens if I fail to bring the cups I promised? The picnic isn’t quite so awesome as people try to drink punch off paper plates.

Many people have unfinished doctorates moldering on their metaphorical tables. About half of those who start doctoral programs don’t finish. Everyone who quits before the finish line has his or her unique reasons for abandoning the dream of earning a doctorate, and I’m not judging you. Your reasons are yours. But even now, the world might be missing your contribution. If nothing else, finishing your degree will change you at a cellular level.

Do you still want to finish your doctorate?

What were your reasons for pursuing a doctorate? Do they still make sense to you? I’m guessing some of you still harbor wistful dreams of finishing your doctorate. Some of you secretly yearn to be addressed as Doctor So and So. Some of you still hanker to see your scintillating dissertation in print.

Love your dissertation, or not, but get it done

Here we are careening into a new year. It’s a great time to reflect on our goals, assess our progress, and revise our directions going forward. I’ll go first: I want to create a small publishing empire. There, I said it. I don’t know if I can do it but I know for sure, if I don’t try, I’m certain to fail.

Do you still want that doctorate? What actions would you have to take to move in that direction?

Maybe my book will help you overcome obstacles and get it done.

Print version
Kindle version 

Verified by MonsterInsights