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As mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a new Sloan Consortium report suggests that the higher education distance learning market is growing at almost 10 percent per year, compared to an overall growth rate of 1.5 percent.

1 out of 5 college students are taking a distance education course

These figures are based on 5 years of survey results across 2500 US universities and colleges.

A free PDF of the entire report is available here. This is just another piece of evidence that distance education, including online courses, have become a key success factor for US universities. Distance education is also a very popular delivery method for corporate training – that’s one reason I recommend that college students take a few online courses. The ability to learn at a distance has also become a key success factor for college graduates.

The New York Times has published an article on doctoral education, with a long discussion on shortening the process:

The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33…

It took me 48 months to complete my Ph.D. at the University of Georgia as a full-time student. I earned my MBA at Rollins College in 21 months as a full-time student. An MBA was not a requirement in UGA’s business administration program, but I couldn’t have done my doctoral coursework without some solid MBA experience.

Is doctoral education supposed to be a career?

Four years was an average time to completion for business doctorates, as I recall. I spent almost 3 years taking doctoral courses and seminars. I proposed, wrote and defended my dissertation during my final year.

While I was classified as a full-time student at UGA, I also had a job. I taught at least one undergraduate management course for the management department each quarter. The college used doctoral teaching assistants as instructors, so I designed and taught my management courses, based on the college’s model syllabi and required textboks. The professors gave the doctoral students a great deal of flexibility, as long as we taught all our classes, and produced reasonable student evaluations and average grades.

It seems like a different world back then. We weren’t really on the Internet at the Terry College of Business. We used a service called BITNET to send emails within the college. BITNET used a store-and-forward approach to move emails and files aong the network.

I knew a few students who did their dissertations from a distance. Theirs was a difficult road. Manuscripts had to be mailed in paper form or on diskettes. Phone calls replaced conferences.

I have a box of paper notes in my office that I consult every now and then. Several students and I cobbled these together from our own files, as well as files donated to us by previous students. One of these days I should spend an afternoon and scan them into my digital archives.