The Future of Doctoral Training in Nonprofit Studies: New Students and New Challenges

The past decade has witnessed important shifts affecting the training of doctoral students studying nonprofits. The student body has become larger and more diverse as more students gain access to graduate school, more universities introduce doctoral programs, and the increasing use of the PhD or the Doctorate in Public Administration (DPA) as a professional qualification drives practitioners to seek these degrees. At the same time, academic hiring has not kept pace with the number of graduates, while non-academic employers are increasingly interested in hiring PhDs and DPAs. How should educators respond to these challenges? Combining market data with our experiences as teachers and pracademics from several different disciplines, we offer a roadmap for the evolution of doctoral training. We argue that doctoral programs must focus on meeting employer needs ahead of boosting recruitment. This includes focusing on training students for practitioner jobs and moving away from defining student success as an academic job offer. Programs must embrace the diversity of their students and attend to the needs of the whole student by developing peer support structures, encouraging faculty mentorship, adopting new teaching practices, including interdisciplinary perspectives, and creating resources that orient students to both doctoral study and post-graduation employment.