What’s driving the new professional doctorates?

By Ami Zusman. In the past 10 to 15 years, new kinds of doctorate degrees – in fields that had never had doctorates before – have burst onto the higher education scene in the United States. These new ‘professional practice doctorate’, or PPD, degrees have emerged in at least a dozen fields, ranging from physical therapy to bioethics. Some of these newly created doctorate degrees are now required for a person to enter a professional practice. In other fields, although they are not (or not yet) required, these doctorates have become the normative degree. Read more...