3.4 Attraction and selection of applicants for a doctoral program  (Page 7/7)

Like potential applicants for a doctoral program in educational leadership, educational faculty members responsible for administering these programs want to make informed decisions. Poor selection decisions relative to admission of candidates to a doctoral program have many undesired consequents for faculty members as well as for institutions of higher education. Unsuccessful students may create a public relations problem and marginally successful students absorb an insurmountable amount of faculty time in conceptualizing, conducting, and defending an acceptable dissertation.

In light of the emerging research stream addressing the predictive validity of subjective information obtained from reference sources as well as the objective information involving past academic performances and future academic potentials of applicants, all data collected in this study indicate that improvements can be made over past practices as used by most doctoral programs in educational leadership. These improvements are not without effort on the part of educational leadership programs and require the development of an empirical compensatory model for advising potential candidates considering admission to a doctoral program in educational leadership and for delimiting an initial applicant pool seeking admission to this program.

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Author Biography

I. Phillip Young is a Professor of Education at the University of California-Davis and is Director of a University of California Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. His area of interest is Human Resource Management in the public school setting. He has served on the faculty both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and The Ohio State University.

Figure 1. Factors for Each Theoretical Orientation

Applicant AttractionObjective TheorySubjective TheoryContext TheoryMarket AdvantageStarting SalariesSalary GrowthSalary PotentialPlacement ServicesPlacement RatesIndividualized InstructionProfessional GrowthDoctoral CohortNetwork OpportunityStudent-Faculty RatiosTailored ProgramMinimum UGPAMinimum GGPAMinimum GRE Transfer CreditsWritten ExamsProgram Timetable