Some business questions just can’t be answered by Googling.
Even Google concedes that, which is why the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is forking over $95,000 to pay for one of its directors to pursue a new super-hifalutin’ degree at Georgia State University called an executive doctorate in business, or EDB for short.
Maureen Schumacher, 45, a Google exec who lives in Roswell, is a member of GSU’s first “cohort” of 17 students between 35 and 59 from around the country now studying for the degree. She said it’ll make her an “analytical athlete” — able to solve Einsteinian-like problems that now seem beyond solution, or even those nobody’s dreamed up to ask yet.
The new program, for which classes began last fall, is aimed at senior executives who already hold MBAs or equivalent degrees, are working full time and want to be able to fully grasp the mind-boggling non-linear complexities of business, not just order up answers from mathematics, finance and computer geeks.
One of Schumacher’s classmates is Deborah Hazzard-Robinson, 42, who owns her own business consultancy, Atlanta-based 2 Higher Heights, and who has four kids and an Army sergeant husband back from Iraq.
She’s had her MBA since 1997 but decided she needed more specialized education to help her solve complex questions her clients are asking.
“What the doctorate will enable me to do is add more value for clients,” she said. “I’ll be able to do and understand research myself and apply different methods to finding solutions to difficult problems.”
The course takes three years of academic work, including once-a-month residences that run from Thursday through Saturday at GSU’s Buckhead campus — and at the end, a dissertation plowing new ground in business or economic theory.
Though GSU’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business boasts the fourth-largest business school Ph.D. program in the nation, those degrees are drastically different from the EDBs.
EDBs — unlike Ph.D.s — are geared for executives and are offered only by a few universities in the world. Business Ph.D.s are mostly for people who want careers in academia.
“The executive doctorate differs from the traditional Ph.D. in business in terms of the target audience as well as the structure and pacing of the program,” said Mark Keil, who has a doctorate of business administration from Harvard and who is one of the instructors in GSU’s program.
Coincidentally, Kennesaw State University also started a doctorate of business administration recently. It’s also for professionals with master’s degrees — but the DBA, unlike the EBD, is intended mostly for executives who want to become professors.
Tuition at Kennesaw is a tad more modest, at about $72,000 total, and the curriculum, like GSU’s, requires resident, weekend and online studies, said Joe F. Hair, a professor in KSU’s Coles College of Business. He is head of the DBA program, which has 17 students who range in age from 38 to 61.
While the average age of the doctoral students at both universities is 50, KSU’s Jeananne Nicholls, 53, of Pittsburgh is a bit atypical.
She started college at 18, left, then began again at 30, finishing both bachelors and master’s degrees in four years.
“I am a second generation American, a great-granddaughter, granddaughter and daughter of blue collar steel workers dating back to Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill,” said Nicholls, who has two grown daughters and a granddaughter. “I’m a first generation college graduate.”
Before she applied for the KSU program, she had been working full-time, was laid off, took 10 months to find another job and was then laid off from that job after six months.
“What I am after is the realization of my very own dream,” said Nicholls, who toyed with the idea of pursuing a doctorate in business before losing a job that paid a six-figure income. Upon graduation, she plans to pursue “a tenure-track, academic career.”
Classmate Juanne Greene, 38, of Austell, is already a lecturer at KSU but in a nontenure track position, which the doctorate could change.
“In a traditional Ph.D. program, they basically teach you how to research,” she said. “And the requirement for many is to be a full-time unemployed student. This is the complete opposite.”
The new “alternate doctorate” programs are both rare and varied. EDBs similar to GSU’s are offered only by a handful of institutions in the world.
DBAs like KSU’s are offered by Harvard, Boston University, Louisiana Tech and Cleveland State University, according to the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business.
Only two other institutions, Pace University in New York and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, offer doctorates similar to GSU’s — Case’s is an executive doctorate in management and Pace’s a doctorate in professional studies.
Lars Mathiassen, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and academic director of the GSU program, said students are taught “rigorous problem-solving skills” that are fundamental to the success of top executives.
“It is the natural step beyond an MBA,” he said.
Mathiassen said students are taught to employ the same methods for business used by scientists.
Maury Kalnitz, director of the GSU program, said captains of industry “must abandon the idea that schooling is restricted to youth,” and that while people with MBAs are plentiful — 90,000 such degrees were awarded last year — executives need additional training.”
Time required in all professional doctorate programs is “quite significant,” he added.
“The discussions with forward-thinking executive practitioners and leading scholars deliver an excellent forum to test and progress innovative and enduring ideas and frameworks for business and industry leadership,” said Tim Bohling, 40, of IBM, who makes the monthly trek to GSU from Connecticut.
Vijay Patel, 61, of Forsyth, already owns a string of motels across Georgia, but he feels a doctorate from KSU will make him a better businessman.
“I want to help other entrepreneurs get to that first million,” he said.
Schumacher, the Google exec, said Google provides clients “with essentially free and ubiquitous data,” and that “the vast pool of real-time data generated through digital media allows” companies to be more efficient.
But, said the married mother of 7-year-old twin boys, “there is a scarcity in the ability to understand the data and extract value. Through the doctorate program I am obtaining the tools and discipline to conduct research and deliver insightful statistical analysis that will guide marketing decisions.”
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