A decade of doctoral success
Warrington celebrates 10 years of impact for the Doctor of Business Administration program
After former UF Warrington Dean John Kraft read an AACSB study in the early 2000s about an expected gap between the large number of available faculty positions and the small number of Ph.D. students with business degrees, he quickly came up with a way to solve it.
Start a new program.
Kraft immediately began to sketch out the Doctor of Business Administration program at UF Warrington to fill clinical faculty positions at universities across the country. While the expected gap mentioned in the article didn’t come to fruition, the DBA program still turned into a valuable addition to the college.
Today, the program averages 26 students per cohort. Once the 10th cohort graduates in 2026, the program will have produced more than 200 graduates. More than half of graduates are working in full-time or part-time teaching positions, and many others fill executive roles at large companies around the world. Other graduates are entrepreneurs managing their own companies or active-duty military members in executive roles in the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines.
While DBA programs exist around the country, there’s one significant difference that makes the UF Warrington option stand out.
“We decided we would not deliver our program as a plus version of our MBA program,” said Phil Podsakoff, Hyatt and Cici Brown Chair in Business at UF Warrington. “Instead, we chose to design the program as a rigorous but less comprehensive version of our Ph.D. program.”
Because of that decision, students work with many of the same faculty members who teach Ph.D. students. DBA students go through a demanding curriculum designed to help them appreciate the importance of sound research design and analytical reasoning that produce sound decisions in a business setting.
The uniqueness of the DBA graduates shows up in the classroom. Many of the DBA graduates who work at Warrington receive some of the best teacher evaluations every semester. When DBA graduates become clinical faculty, they bring all they’ve learned from the DBA program into the classroom, but they also come with real examples gained while working in the business world.
“Business school students are starving for someone to come in with expertise and real-world experience,” Podsakoff said. “I teach Ph.D. and DBA students at Warrington, and the average age of Ph.D. students entering the program is 24 years old. They’re brilliant and learn how to conduct research very well, but they have little business experience.”
When DBA graduates become clinical faculty at a university, they provide extra flexibility. They’re able to teach more classes and take on roles like the director of a research center, responsibilities that tenure-track faculty aren’t always interested in filling.
The program that was created to fill a specific gap is actually developing graduates who are versatile and ready to fill a broad range of needs at business schools.
