Doctor of Business Administration
Program Goals
Upon completion of all program requirements of the Doctorate in Business Administration degree, learners will be able to:
- Identify, research alternatives, and solve business problems with the highest value-adding solutions.
- Perform systems-based, financially justified analysis and research for operations issues and technology-enabled opportunities in a global, market-based economy.
- Demonstrate business knowledge and be recognized as a business subject expert.
- Formulate and re-design industry rules and standards.
Program Structure
As the global information economy evolves, organizations are becoming increasingly complex, and innovative organizational models and practices have become crucial to successfully addressing this complexity. Consequently, leadership in this environment requires higher, more sophisticated levels of knowledge and skills. The DBA program is designed to serve this need by providing doctoral-level education to professional practitioners in business and management.
The DBA program has a 62-credit requirement that involves both residency and online modalities of instruction. The majority of the program will be delivered in an online, virtual classroom setting. In these courses, learners will work in a cohort of approximately 10 peers and be required to spend approximately 25 hours per week on required coursework.
Courses offered during residency sessions cover a variety of areas essential to the successful completion of this advanced degree program, including insights into dissertation preparation. Additionally, in the third year residency, learners will apply their knowledge to a comprehensive, collaborative case study. This case study is the University's vehicle for assessing programmatic learning. Because of the nature and value of the information presented in the residency environment, learners must attend all residency sessions.
The most important milestone of the DBA degree is the successful completion and oral defense of a significant, substantial, and independently completed doctoral dissertation that adds new information to the body of business knowledge. The dissertation provides the learner an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of seminal and current literature and express their competence in applying learning to actual organizational issues. To ensure the quality of this effort, the program's curriculum is designed to develop the learner's ability to create original solutions to complex issues and to carefully identify and apply the most appropriate research methodology for addressing these issues.
Because of the highly independent nature of the program, learners must be self-disciplined and exceedingly motivated to earn this degree.