Bay Path’s online EdD in Educational Leadership program is at the forefront of the study of education. In an era of heightened disruption and revolutionary challenges, many education experts have called for a new kind of leadership. The program meets this need by teaching students how to re-imagine organizations, institutions, and districts, make tough decisions, re-examine traditional ways of doing business, and adopt an opportunity rather than a scarcity mindset. 

Graduates of this program will learn how to transition institutions into highly adaptive and innovative organizations by leveraging personal and organizational strengths to create meaningful and enduring change. Program graduates will be equipped to make a difference in highly dynamic educational contexts as catalysts to improve educational practices throughout local, state, national, and international arenas. They will acquire the mindset and toolset needed to advance in the field of educational and organizational leadership and to lead in a variety of institutional settings. 

This online, low-residency program offers students a dynamic and highly supportive online cohort-based community. Most importantly, each student will be engaged in a highly personalized leadership development process that includes self-assessment, one-on-one and small group mentoring and coaching and professional development workshops. This program will help students build and maximize their leadership potential within an organizational context. There are two pathways to choose from: Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies (HELOS) or Transformative School Leadership (TSL) for K-12 professionals, and each offers a 54-credit track for students with a masters, a 36-credit doctoral completion track for students with a completed EdS or CAGS degree, and a 30-credit doctoral completion track for those all-but-dissertation (ABD).

The EdD in Educational Leadership program offers two distinctive options: 

1. The ABD 30-credit track allowing students who have completed doctoral coursework but never finished a dissertation to earn their doctoral degrees. More specifically, this program allows doctoral degree candidates who have completed all their coursework from an accredited university to enroll as ABD students and, after completing the first-year programmatic courses and the introduction to action research course, focus on conducting research and writing their dissertations.
2. The EdS/CAGS 36-credit doctoral track enables those who have earned either the EdS or CAGS degrees to accelerate their doctoral degree completion. 

Program Requirements

Students admitted into the 54-credit program complete a combination of required courses along with a self-designed concentration, choosing four elective courses from among a wide-array of approved graduate courses available throughout the graduate curriculum. Students admitted into the 36-credit track or the 30-credit ABD track complete the required courses as outlined in the information listed below.

Students are admitted into one of the following tracks based on their educational background:

Student Learning Outcomes

Graduates of the EdD in Educational Leadership program will be able to:

• Identify and address critical and contemporary issues in educational policy and practice through understanding educational organizations as complex and dynamic organizations
• Manage and lead in an educational context through addressing and mitigating conflict and challenges as transformational leaders
• Integrate principles of administration and management with organizational capability and viability
• Lead as self-reflective, visionary, and entrepreneurial change agents equipped to bring cutting edge thinking and management processes to one’s organizational roles
• Leverage technology and institutional resources to achieve strategic goals and priorities
• Build and nurture a sense of community, enhanced motivation, risk-taking, creativity, flexibility, and innovation within an educational context
• Demonstrate high-level analytic thinking, advanced research design, and problem-solving skills to implement organizational change and serve as catalysts to improve organizational practices
• Carry out an evidence-informed change initiative
• Write an action research dissertation of publishable quality