Doctoral-level degrees (such as DBA, EdD, EngD, or PhD) seem to be rare among second-career academics, i.e., those who taken up academic jobs in universities after a substantial first career in the professional world outside academia. Many of them enrol themselves for higher academic qualifications. I am looking for any reliable data on this.
Your question is really interesting to me because I support both an EdD and DBA program. Since I haven't found a credible source of comprehensive stats, I started thinking about particular disciplines and professions. That lead me to look for surveys that researchers had conducted.
Page 124 of this article http://www.naspaa.org/jpaemessenger/Article/VOL21-1/10_Rahm%20et%20al.pdf suggests about 25% in Poli-Sci and/or Public Administration & Affairs.
"Second Career Professionals: Transitioning to the Faculty Role" in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Faculty Development (sorry, I couldn't find a freely available full-text link) sounds promising.
And then there's this: http://jpaap.napier.ac.uk/index.php/JPAAP/article/view/125 A comparative study of Australian academics with and without a doctorate.
You raised an interesting point and I can attest to second career professional. I think the latter bring a wealth of industry experience that the traditional academics lack, so it's really good to have second career professionals in academia.
Many thanks,
Debra
Mr. Dash,
There is difficult to find a detail study in this topic. May be there are few regional sociological startistics, but most probably not representative.
It would be very difficult to get the data you seek. For Business Administration faculty one possible measure could be the number of people who go through the AACSB "retraining" to be deemed academically qualified to teach in AACSB-accredited institutions. My understanding is that the program was not a great success and may have been discontinued.
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