Bay Path’s Doctorate of Education in Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies (HELOS) is on the forefront of the study of higher education. In an era of heightened disruption and revolutionary challenges, many higher education experts have called for a new kind of leadership. Bay Path’s Doctorate in Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies meets this need by teaching students how to re-imagine institutions, make tough decisions, reexamine whether old ways of doing business are still relevant 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. Students will learn how to leverage personal and organizational strengths and capacity to create impactful and enduring organizational and personal success. Program graduates will be equipped to make a difference in the highly dynamic higher education context as catalysts to improve higher education practices throughout local, state, national, and international arenas. They will gain the knowledge and skills needed to advance in the field of higher education management; in addition, they will gain the initiative and capabilities to transform higher education organizations into responsive, nimble and resilient institutions.

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.

The Doctorate of Education in Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies program also offers a distinctive option as an all-but-dissertation (ABD) accelerated program allowing students who have completed doctoral coursework but never finished a dissertation to earn their doctoral degrees. More specifically, this program will allow 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 writing their dissertations.

Program Requirements

The 54-credit HELOS program requires that students complete a self-designed concentration, choosing four elective courses from among a wide-array of approved graduate courses available throughout the graduate curriculum. The HELOS all-but-dissertation (ABD) concentration requires the completion of a minimum of 30 credits in HELOS courses to meet degree requirements, including the four sequential dissertation courses engaging students in action research.

All students choose from one of the following concentrations (based on the combination of their educational background and interests):

Student Learning Outcomes

Graduates of the Doctorate of Education in Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies program are expected to be able to:

• Identify and address critical and contemporary issues in educational policy and practice through understanding colleges and universities as complex and dynamic organizations
• Manage and lead higher education institutions through addressing and mitigating conflict and technical and adaptive 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 their institutional 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 higher education institutions
• Demonstrate high-level analytic thinking, advanced research design, and problem-solving skills to implement organizational change and serve as catalysts to improve institutional practices
• Lead institutional governance initiatives and work with multiple constituents including staff, administration, faculty, alumni, and boards of trustees
• Write an action research dissertation of publishable quality