What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

I don't think the government is obliged to pay the contractors more for people with PhDs, but it does choose to.

I admittedly do not know much about post-baccalaureate academia. If a non-accredited school in fact does offer a PhD simply for taking classes, can you call yourself doctor? What about a non-accredited school that still requires a dissertation but 99% of those submitted are approved? I am assuming that an accredited school handing out PhDs like this would lose their accreditation but maybe that's not the case.

I'm just not sure under what circumstances it's a legitimate decision to say "You may have a PhD but you're not really a doctor."

There are a lot of ways degrees can be bogus. With online education seemingly at the nexus of technology, timing, investor interest & consumer demand we're hearing a lot about it lately. Most astute commentators spend some time on the question of credentialing.

It's one of these weird issues where the new thing needs a good solution, but when you look at the old thing you see that it has a pretty terrible solution and that the problem might not be solvable.

I went to a well respected school. A pass in an arts degree "Arts Degree" (meaning humanities, mostly) at that school was basically available to anyone willing to show up, turn in 20k-30k words per semester (regardless of quality) and attend 3-4 tutorial per week without preparation. They just don't normally fail someone who completes the requirements, with a very liberal definition of that concept. It's not like math where you can either solve the problem in the exam or you can't. They accepted that subjectivity and left a large loophole wide open.

At the same time, very few students actually took advantage of that, with prior intent. Most of the learning opportunity was ungraded. There was 4-500 weekly pages of required reading on Kant, North African Medieval History, the history of ideas in cognitive psychology or high classical interpretations of the allegory of the cave. If you showed up at lectures, tutorials and discussions ready to discuss these materials every day you would probably experience learning that is unlikely to occur outside a university.

The mechanism for making sure you actually learn is always some degree of lax. That's within a University that has no interest, need or intent to exchange pieces of paper for money. Throw in globalization, an infinite number of institutions , the monetary incentives faced by bottom tier schools, etc and you have a big chunk of bogus degrees.

So… We can open the door and turn the lights on a lot of rooms with a lot of sordid activity. We'll get to see a lot of things we'd rather not see with knickers indignantly bunched up around ankles. I seriously doubt the "Intelligence Community" is unique in any way.

It's tricky shedding light on problems we don't know how to solve.

Nothing inherent.

But… Whiteboard schools are older and most of the currently higher reputation institutions are mostly physical. Many online-only schools are lower reputation, newer, or lower tier.

Also, if the school has a cynical business model of serving students interested entirely on the piece of paper saying they attended.

You could come up with similarly derogatory things to say about Pacific Island institutions, nigh schools, etc. It's a correlation not a causation.

I think there's also reality to the task of attaining what we think of as a valid Masters Degree of PHD. A family, and a full-time job are very demanding pursuits. I commend anyone who can achieve that kind of degree with those kinds of commitments. But, I also think it's suspicious when schools see their core offering as something suitable for a full time working family man to get a masters degree in 18 months in his spare time, especially if the area tends to subjectivity.

here's the relevant image: https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-do...

the analysis is pretty straightforward from there.