A model project: focused on steering minorities toward business doctorates, the PhD project serves as a successful model for other minority student doctoral initiatives - Special reports: Careers - the PhD Project

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 22, 2001 by Ronald Roach

For many who are earning a master's in business administration (MBA), attaining the coveted degree virtually guarantees them a ticket to a lucrative career path in corporate America. However, when Dr. Pamela Carter took a business teaching job at a community college in northern Virginia after earning her MBA in 1994, she took the first steps on a career path substantially different than one in corporate America.

Carter's interest in teaching and participation in a program known as the PhD Project put the Yardley, Penn., native on a course where she earned a doctorate in management information systems from Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Now in her second year as an assistant professor in the business school at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Carter credits the PhD Project for helping open the doors to a successful graduate school experience and a rewarding teaching position.

"I would say the PhD Project was extremely instrumental to my pursuit of a doctoral degree," Carter says.

Since 1994, the PhD Project, principally backed and managed by the Montvale, N.J.-based KPMG Foundation, has helped steer hundreds of aspiring Black, Latino and American Indian scholars into business doctoral programs. More than 150 PhD Project participants have gone on to accept assistant professorships at business schools across the country. PhD Project officials proudly contend that among participants who have enrolled into business doctoral programs the total attrition rate is 5 percent, which compares favorably to the 25 percent drop out rate among all business doctoral students.

"Once a person is accepted into a program, they are immediately part of (a) supporting network," says Bernard J. Milano, president of the KPMG Foundation.

In seven years, the program has built a track record attractive enough to win the attention of higher education and foundation officials working to boost the numbers of underrepresented minorities in doctoral programs and on academic faculties. Officials say the program's design and operation offers lessons that could apply to other minority student doctoral initiatives.

"They've been having a higher graduation rate than other minority doctoral programs. The participants in the PhD Project are taking five to six years to finish their programs. It takes an average of nine years for students in anthropology to finish a Ph.D. The PhD Project is actually a model for the rest of us," says Dr. Earl Lewis, dean of the graduate school at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus.

HOW THE PHD PROJECT SHAPES UP

The centerpiece of the program is an annual conference held in Chicago in November. The conference attracts between 400 and 500 Black, Latino and American Indian participants, according to program officials. At the annual conference, representatives from 80 of the 100 business doctoral programs in the United States meet with and inform aspiring students about the details of the respective programs. The PhD Project pays for travel and hotel expenses of the participants.

University of Oklahoma's Carter recalls attending the first PhD Project conference in November 1994. The conference allowed her to speak with both faculty members and doctoral students who specialized in the management information systems arena, which is the research area in which Carter teaches.

"When I got there and started listening to faculty, I decided then this was what I wanted to do," she says.

For any Black, Latino and American Indian student who gains admission to and enrolls in a business doctoral program, the PhD Project has established minority doctoral associations in five discipline areas. The associations are in finance, information systems, management, accounting and marketing. Each year, the PhD Project organizes a meeting in each of the disciplines for the student members. The meetings usually precede the annual meeting of national professional associations so that the students can attend their minority doctoral student association meeting and the national meeting of scholars in their discipline. The PhD Project pays for travel and hotel expenses of students who attend the doctoral association and national meetings.

Doctoral students in the PhD Project have the comfort of knowing the minority doctoral students in their field from around the country, says Milano.

Antonio M. R. Vernon, a Black finance doctoral student at the University of Chicago, says his association connects him with other minority doctoral students in finance. Finance is a business field known to have very few minorities as either students or faculty members. "Blacks represent just one-half of 1 percent of the finance faculty in the United States," he says.

The program enjoys significant corporate support. Milano estimates that more than $12 million has gone into the program over seven years. The current operating budget for 2001 is $1.8 million. Major supporters include the KPMG Foundation, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Motor Company and Merrill Lynch & Company.