Charity Doctors: The Need for a Non-Profit Ph.D.
Charity Navigator
By Trent Stamp, Executive Director
April 13, 2002
America today depends on non-profits. The services they provide are the ones once provided by our now-shrunken government, the benefits and opportunities that made this country great. This expansion of deliverables has touched us all. Most of us are affiliated with at least one non-profit, either as a donor, a staff member, a board member, or a volunteer. And all of us reap the benefits from America's non-profits and charities, either directly or indirectly.
Quite simply, the charities and non-profits of America today are a massive and far-reaching industry. More than 850,000 non-profit organizations exist. Last year, those organizations received more than $200 billion in contributions. Somewhere around fifteen percent of our Gross Domestic Product flows through America's charities.
And as an employer, the role non-profit organizations play is no less significant. Next year, thousands upon thousands of talented young people will begin their careers by joining the other ten million Americans employed by non-profit organizations. They will do this because they want to make a difference, because they seek to work for a purpose other than the almighty dollar, and because, frankly, that's where most of the jobs are today.
And nearly every single person who enters the field of non-profits, especially those with the skills and aspirations to be leaders, will do so under-prepared. This is because, in this country where institutes of higher learning can be found on every corner, the number of schools in this nation that offer a Ph.D. in non-profit management is …two. To prepare for this massive and amazingly vital industry, just two accredited schools in the United States offer a non-profit management Ph.D.
To contrast, over one hundred accredited schools offer a Ph.D. in philosophy. Granted, philosophy has been around a little longer than non-profit management and has a few better-known alumni, but it's a difficult argument to make today that philosophers bring more value to society or are in higher demand than experts in non-profit management. When was the last time you met someone who had "Philosopher" listed on his business card?
And yet, over fifty times more opportunities exist in this country to obtain a doctorate in philosophy than do opportunities to become a scholar in non-profit management. In the fastest growing sector of the American economy, an industry where not only does 8% of our population work, but an industry where ethical, legal, moral, societal, and yes, philosophical debates abound, shouldn't we be encouraging a bit more advanced scholarship than is yielded by two programs in the country?
Before we advance much further, one point must be made. I am not arguing that we need more people with Ph.D.'s running non-profits. People without doctorates are currently running organizations at their highest levels. Rather, I'm making the point that we need Ph.D.'s to train people in how to run good organizations. At the university level, teachers are people with Ph.D's. If we don't offer Ph.D.'s in non-profit management, people who are interested in that field will never learn from true scholars who have done research in their particular field. We need teachers and programs and degrees where this high level of academia is promoted and celebrated. Only then can the industry advance as it should.
Even in business schools, the most cut-throat academic environs in existence today, most classes are taught by academics, people with doctorate degrees. This is the way it has always been done. And yet, most of the students do not go on to obtain their Ph.D., but rather stop with their MBA. But they were taught by people with Ph.Ds, people who understood the research, the scholarship, and the data, and had made the choice to teach rather than practice. As a result, those who choose to practice at least have the benefit of being taught by the scholars and have the theory at their disposal to guide their practical actions. By not having programs that generate doctors of non-profit management, we are robbing those students who want to practice, but need the theory. We are in effect creating a two-tiered system where our for-profit managers have the benefit of theory and practice, but non-profit managers are armed only with practice.
Some people will argue that we don't need non-profit management schools and advanced degrees, because we already have an abundance of excellent graduate programs in for-profit management. 387 degree-granting MBA programs exist in this country. Why can't those programs fill this need? Isn't good management simply good management? The answer, in my opinion, is yes and no. While there are many shared characteristics of good managers, three problems exist with the idea that "management is management" and therefore people who want to run non-profit organizations should learn side by side with those who aspire to run for-profit organizations.
- The skills are not exactly the same. While managers in both industries share some skill sets (personnel, accounting, strategic planning, marketing, etc.), the non-profit sector contains a whole other set of skills that the excellent manager will possess. Non-profit leaders work in an arena where programs delivered, not profits, are the bottom line. Many of their external relationships are pro-bono. They are accountable not to shareholders, but to the entire American public, as a result of their being granted non-profit status. Board relations are different, motivating employees is different, public disclosure and accountability is vastly different. And unfortunately, most of a good non-profit executive's time is spent fund-raising, a skill completely underutilized in the for-profit sector.
So, the skill sets may be similar, but they're also vastly different. We wouldn't ask someone who wanted to get a Ph.D. in the poetry of Emily Dickinson to actually get it in Faulkner, under the theory that they are similar because they both wrote and furthermore, did it in English. We shouldn't force people who want to manage charities to try and apply the skills they learned in running for-profit businesses. The job is too important for an imperfect fit.
- Even if the curriculum were a perfect fit, the cost of an MBA is prohibitive. Charitable salaries will always be significantly lower than for-profit businesses, where there are profits to share. The psychic pay of saving the world is a great help to attracting excellent leaders. It is not enough however. As long as the pay is significantly lower for a non-profit leader than it is for a for-profit leader, we cannot charge them the same fee to enter their respective industries. This is what we do when we force them both to get MBAs, even though they are bound for different paths.
- The prerequisites are large and unnecessary. Each day, competition for slots in excellent MBA programs becomes more competitive. Most excellent schools now require at least five years of work experience before admission. Usually, this experience needs to be "relevant" to the program, which means it should be in the for-profit business world.
Therefore, by trying to force the square peg (people who want to lead charities) into the round hole (business schools), we are asking people who have no interest in running for-profit companies to spend five years of their life working where they don't want to work, to take classes they don't want to take, to incur debt they won't be able to handle, just to get a job they want, but won't be adequately prepared for. This makes no sense. The argument is the same for other "management" type degree programs, whether it be public policy, public administration, or organizational behavior. While all have some components in common with non-profit management, they are different disciplines.
So now we know that we do not have an adequate system for preparing non-profit scholars, but we know that nearly a million non-profits exist in this country and all seem to have some sort of leadership. Where do these people come from?
The answer, simply, is everywhere. Some people who lead non-profits in this country have succeeded in other arenas, but never demonstrated that they could run a large charity. Others have worked their way up through the organization, know the ins and outs, but never obtained the formal schooling so common in the private sector. Some charity leaders actually founded the organization, have the vision and the wisdom to create something out of nothing, but in reality have never been trained to budget, or plan strategically, or handle personnel. And of course, there are the inevitable and previously mentioned MBAs, who grow disillusioned by the culture of the private sector and try to bring their mismatched skill sets back to the non-profit world.
Remarkably, if not miraculously, out of these non-traditional paths to the top, you get some genuinely amazing leaders. In our evaluation of some 1100 of America's biggest and best-known non-profit organizations, we found some of the most talented, creative, intelligent people in the country. I have no doubt that the great leaders of the non-profit sector are as good, if not better, than the best the private sector has to offer. Much of this must be a testament to how desperate good people are to work for a cause, and how much can be done if employees can reap the psychic benefits of genuinely making the world a better place.
But we found this level of leadership to be in spite of, rather than as a result of, the training that exists in America's institutions of higher learning. It may simply be no more complex than magic in a bottle. We may just be lucky to have trained people so poorly and got so much from them. We can only imagine at this point how well our non-profits could be operating, if their leaders had been given the tools to succeed.
Even more disheartening though is that, because of the lack of higher-level doctoral degree programs in non-profit management in this country, we haven't found the high level of academic thought and discourse you would expect for a field of this importance. "Theory" regarding motivating employees or Board development doesn't hold precedence, because there is no theory. No one is undertaking serious research or analysis in non-profit management because very few are receiving doctorates in this field. The level of scholarship is embarrassingly minimal.
As a result, our leaders are under-trained, and lack the data and the scholarship to call upon to guide their actions. They are forced to call upon the academic research of other disciplines, and again, to try to force another industry's template onto their unique circumstances. This is a shame.
Charities and non-profits are a vital part of our society. They deserve to have the same level of leadership training that the for-profit sector does. Furthermore, they deserve the same level of analysis, criticism, and discourse that academic disciplines like philosophy, literature, and psychology do. Non-profit analysis and management should no longer be the poor stepchild of academia, forced to make do with what's left over from the other disciplines. Without the commitment at our colleges and universities to make this discipline respected and warranted, the multi-discipline "patchwork" approach to non-profit management will continue.
The field of non-profit management is tangible, vital, challenging, and necessary, and deserves an academic support system to mirror this reality. Until it is created, we will continue down this path of ignorant bliss, where "real world", on-the-job training is all that is offered, and theory and high-end analysis will be ignored. And then we will continue to ask more of our non-profits and their leaders. We can only hope they continue to win the battle, as we continue to refuse to give them the weaponry they need.
