News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Tennessee Tech is proposing a new Ph.D. in Higher Education.
Professor Jeremy Wendt said this program will be unique because it is entirely online, which is rare for Ph.D. programs. He said the higher education degree will train students for professional administrative positions.
“At Tennessee Tech there are over 100 different positions that have director or executive or administrator, or vice president in the job title,” Wendt said. “And so that will be our primary audience, someone who is early in their career, looking to advance.”
Wendt said students in the new program will be learning to use data to make important administrative decisions. He said this will prepare students to progress and become directors in areas such as student success, residential life, and institutional effectiveness.
“THEC and all the different state institutions have lots of data, there’s lots of different databases and lots of data sets,” Wendt said. “And so part of the specialization of this that will make it unique is that we will prepare those candidates to not only understand the data but to analyze it and really get into it and use it for their job.”
Wendt said the university will need to hire additional staff members for the new program. He said the program is an interdisciplinary program, and not taught entirely within the College of Education.
“We will have education-specific faculty that will be teaching some of the research classes,” Wendt said. “But then, for the most part, our faculty will come from higher education admin backgrounds.”
Wendt said he predicts the University will accept about 20 students into the program in its first year. He said he hopes the program will eventually have the capacity to admit more students more regularly.
Tennessee Tech will be presenting its proposal for final approval in July.
