Are PhDs awarded for all fields, such as humanities and sciences?
Also, what’s the record on degrees held by a person?
There are a few alternatives to the PhD… the MD and the PharmD come to mind. At my university, people from the School of Science and the School of Liberal Arts both get PhDs, though.
By the time I’m finished I’ll have four college degrees (two BAs, one MA, one PhD). I knew a guy who had six, though (two of each).
You can have two BAs? That’s interesting.
Ravi Shankar has 14 honorary PhDs.
Bachelor of Arts? You can have as many as you want…
I’ll also have four - 1 B.S., 1 B.A., 1 M.A., and 1 Ph.D.
Another alternative degree is JD for law students here in the US.
its not too hard if the subjects are similiar. Im thinking of getting a BS in chemistry, in order to also qualify for a BS in biochemistry i only have to take 10-15 extra credit hours.
I also have two BS’s. I think it’s not that uncommon. You can get two of anything, can’t you, if they’re given for more than one subect?
You can get a PhD in any field of any name, provided the college has met certain accreditation requirements and the college approves the creation of the degree program. However, having degree programs in “frivolous” fields endangers the college’s accreditation. New fields are started all the time and degree programs in them soon follow. I have seen dozens of such creations.
My own field, Computer Science, went thru all this starting in the 60s. My advisor’s advisor is the first person to get a PhD in Computer Science. A faculty member once tried to strongly persuade me to get a PhD in the new (non-CS) “System Science” program. I would have been student #2 there. Don’t know if there were any others anywhere else at the time. I’ve sat on committees drawing up programs in “Cognitive Science” and “Discrete Math” and on and on.
If you can create it, get it approved by all the higher ups, it’s a real degree. (Most Board of Regents rubber stamp such things.)
Honorary degrees don’t mean a thing to anybody. A lot of celebs turn them down because they are busy, don’t want to give a speech, and (most importantly) don’t want the ensuing “how about a donation?” crap. If you have an honorary degree, you list it under the “Honors and awards” section near the end of your vita, not under “Education”.
Getting degrees becomes quite easy after a certain point. I could have gotten a 2nd Masters degree, but it would have cost 50 bucks.
There are some fields where an M.S. (or equivalent) is the “terminal degree”, e.g., an M.L.S. in Library Science.
This doesn’t mean you can’t get a Ph.D., it just means you only really use a Ph.D. for teaching or being a library director, just as you can get an M.D., or enroll in an M.D./Ph.D. program.
I think calling MS/MA “terminal” degrees is a bit off, even for fields that typically produce a lot of masters level degreee holders. In most or perhaps even all of those fields, there are further degrees in that line of study.
The difference is, for some fields of study (law, library science, business for example), the master’s level is typically the degree that is needed to pursue a professional life in that field. In these fields, the “terminal” masters degree often bears only passing resemblance to the type of learning that happens when pursuing the doctoral degree.
An MBA is a good example. A PhD (or a DBA - an alternate doctoral level type of business degree) in business is a very different beast than an MBA. While other fields of study (like literature for instance) may give a master’s degree to a PhD candidate somewhere along the path to PhD, this does not typically happen in business.
(This may also have something to do with the fact that top business schools charge tens of thousands per year to MBAs while waiving tuition and giving assistantships to doctoral candidates – it wouldn’t take long for folks to start signing up for a PhD program and then quitting once they got their MBA.)
I have seen a few instances of a Psy.D. being used for a Doctor of Psychology.
Honorary degrees don’t count. My biophysical energetics prof. (visiting scholar – he was actually an engineering consultant) had seven earned degrees: BS in Physics from Berkeley and BS in Engineering from Stanford (earned concurrently), two master’s degrees in engineering (different areas – civil and mechanical, I think) a Ph.D. in Engineering, a Ph.D. in Biophysics, and a JD. Or something like that. He may be retired now – I can’t find anything about him online.
There are Ph.D’s in Library Science, but not a lot. They are almost all in academia and they write some of the dullest papers in the world.
I’ve had to read them.
There are also LLM degrees; usually they’re degrees awarded to JDs for advanced fields of study like environmental law or tax law or somesuch.
Also, rabbis in the U.S. are awarded Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters degrees.
Robin
Fourteen replies and no mention of the M.F.A.? The Master’s of Fine Arts is the terminal fine arts degree.
And by “terminal degree”, I mean “the highest degree you need in that field to get a full-time, tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level and higher at a nationally accredited university.”
(To more fully address the OP, tha’s not to say that a Ph.D. in Fine Arts doesn’t exist–they do–but the MFA is still considered a terminal degree.)
A number of academicians have an Ed.D (Doctorate of Education). And Indiana University actually offered (is still offering?) an Re.D, which is a Doctorate of Recreation. The holder of this degree specializes in the field of Recreation and Park Administration
I was under the assumption that you can only hold one Ph.D. PharmD counts as a Ph.D for all intensive purposes. (Doctor of Pharmacy). Aside from having Ph.D equivillant education in more than one field, how do you convince the board to grant you mutiple Ph.Ds?
I reckon it would be very difficult to have earned PhDs in more than one discipline, not impossible, of course, but pretty difficult.
In chemistry in this country (and in other laboratory disciplines here and in other countries, for all I know) you can be awarded a DSc after a large amount of research, attainment of an international reputation and global recognition by your peers in the international field.
Who awards them, does anyone know?