Ask a room of college faculty how they ended up chairing a department and you’ll hear a lot of the same story. Nobody planned it. They loved teaching, or research, or working with students, and then the dean stopped by one afternoon and asked if they’d “take a turn” for a few years. People in advising, admissions and student services have a version of this too. You get good at your job, you look up, and you start wondering what’s next. Usually that’s the moment an Ed.D. starts to sound interesting.
What does a department chair really do all day?
More than you’d think. From the hallway it can look like teaching plus a few extra meetings. In reality, chairs build the course schedule, wrangle the budget, run hiring, mentor new faculty, referee disagreements between colleagues, field student complaints and act as the go-between for faculty and the dean. Plenty of them are still teaching on top of all that.
Here’s the part that surprises people. Most chairs get almost no training for it. The University Council for Educational Administration surveyed chairs, and Inside Higher Ed reported the results. Sixty-seven percent said their institution gave them no formal training at all. The ones who did get some? Most got 10 hours or less, and two-thirds of them said it wasn’t enough. What did they wish they’d learned? Stuff like evaluating faculty, keeping the department climate healthy and putting a budget together.
So yeah, people get handed real authority with next to no prep. That’s the hole a leadership doctorate is meant to fill. Nobody in a chemistry Ph.D. program sits you down and shows you how to read a budget, or how to tell a colleague of fifteen years “no” and then share a coffee pot with them the next morning.
Wait, isn’t an Ed.D. just a Ph.D. in education?
Nope, though I get why people think so. The Ph.D. is the research one. You spend years on original research, and it mostly sets you up for an academic research career. The Ed.D. (Doctor of Education) is for practitioners, folks who want to fix things where they work. You take what the research already says and point it at real problems on a real campus. Retention. A program that needs redesigning. Some big change nobody’s thrilled about. Budget cuts, and how to get through them without losing your best people.
Want to lead people and programs instead of chasing one research question for five years? Then that practical bent is probably what’ll pull you in.
Where can it take you?
Lots of places, honestly. I’ll run through the usual suspects.
The obvious one is department chair. For a lot of faculty it’s the first real taste of leadership. It usually rotates every few years, and if you’re good at it, people notice.
Then there’s associate dean or dean. Now you’ve got several departments under you, you’re deciding academic priorities, and the budgets get a lot bigger. The Bureau of Labor Statistics files provosts, deans, registrars, admissions directors and student affairs leaders all under one label, postsecondary education administrators. Their median pay was $104,590 in 2025. Job growth? Slow, about 2 percent through 2035. Still, the BLS figures roughly 14,500 openings a year on average, since people keep retiring or moving on.
Student affairs is a whole other lane. Think deans of students, or whoever runs advising or residence life. They’re the ones shaping what college feels like once class lets out, and for the senior jobs, having a doctorate can give you an edge.
Some people flip it around and head back to teaching full time, often in education departments or at community colleges. For postsecondary teachers, the BLS is projecting 7 percent growth from 2025 to 2035 and around 103,300 openings each year.
And a few wander off into consulting, accreditation or institutional research. Anywhere colleges need help making smarter calls with their data, really.
Why do it online? And what’s the capstone about?
Think about who’s actually going after these jobs. Mostly people who already work full time, often at the same school they’d like to lead someday. Quitting for three years to sit in a classroom usually isn’t realistic. Online lets you keep the job and the paycheck. It also means your own campus can become a sort of test lab for what you’re studying.
That ties into the capstone. Some programs skip the traditional dissertation and use an applied capstone built around a real-world problem. Rockhurst University’s online EdD program with capstone breaks it into two parts. Part one, you define a research problem and dig through the literature. Part two, you collect data and write it up as a full research article formatted for a higher ed journal, plus a poster presentation.
Picture what that looks like for a future chair. You could look into why students keep leaving your program, or how faculty workload is actually split up, or what’s dragging down enrollment. Then you finish with findings you can act on, and maybe even publish.
As for the nuts and bolts, Rockhurst’s higher ed concentration is 45 credit hours and takes about two years. It’s all online, and you go through it with the same cohort. You’ll get classes on policy, ethics and legal frameworks, organizational change, college teaching and a few others. Oh, and there’s a free add-on. You can pick up a graduate certificate in something like organizational leadership or strategic communication without paying extra.
Close to home in Southern Maryland
If you’re working in Southern Maryland, maybe at a community college or a regional campus, or in a K-12 district with your sights on higher ed, the online format is a big deal. You don’t have to move. You don’t have to walk away from steady work. Keep doing your job, keep learning on it, and let the degree catch up with you.
Is it the right move for you?
Be honest with yourself here. Does more time in front of students sound like the dream? Or do clunky processes drive you nuts until you fix them? When something goes sideways at work, are people already knocking on your door? If you’re nodding along, you’re probably leaning toward leadership whether you meant to or not.
Will an Ed.D. get you the title on its own? No. Experience counts. So do the people you know, and plain old timing. But you’ll come out with better tools, the right vocabulary and a habit of backing decisions with evidence, which is pretty much what higher ed wants from its leaders now. That next step won’t feel like such a leap.
