Snobbery regarding Doctorate degrees vs PhD

[Sishirunak]

Does anybody have any experience of this first hand? I'm currently applying for Doctor of Education degrees as I work in the field, and I think it will be more suitable for me than a traditional PhD. I'm not looking to pursue a research career.
I've heard on the grapevine that professional Doctorates are looked down upon by academics, and that they aren't considered at the same level as PhDs despite both being exactly the same status and making you a Doctor.
What I've read is that as the Doctorates have taught modules and perhaps a shorter thesis, people just don't believe it should be awarded at PhD level as it isn't 100% research.
This doesn't put me off applying for one and I am still going ahead with it.

In the software areas, you’ll find that most PhD programs now also incorporate some taught modules in the first year or two to ensure the students have a solid foundation, and these are typically targeted towards topics of value in industry. Of course it’s primarily research, but underpinned by some core taught foundational modules.

It sounds like immaturity for people to say such silly things. Or insecurity. People who defend the boundaries of who can contribute to ‘their subject’ eg by dismissing others’ contributions tend to be arseholes in other ways and see themselves as better than service users, students etc too. They also tend to be rude and argumentative at conferences without the ability to value others’ research. So glad I did most of my studies at two institutions where such nonsense wasn’t entertained.

I’m not an academic but some of the best-regarded people in my field didn’t have a doctorate/PhD or even occasionally an academic position, and used to put their home address for the correspondence address on academic papers but were welcomed to collaborate/guest lecture.

Other universities didn’t have the same approach. Their loss.

Sadly being a professor or head of department doesn’t make you a mature adult or a decent human being and there doesn’t seem to be enough accountability or transparency to the academic hiring process so if academia is what you want to get into, a PhD might be the necessary route.

Having said that, I don’t get the impression there would be the same prejudice against DFA vs a PhD in creatIve subjects, because the level of original work is so high, but that might be just how it seems from the outside.

It depends what you want to do with your qualification (and where) as to which would be best, though. There isn’t an absolute.

Yes there is a huge difference! I have to write another 80,000 words in assignments in addition to the 40,000 thesis. And that doesn't include 3 days per week clinical placement work including all the paper work... not remotely like a masters! My doctorate is quite different to PhD or masters. But when I say I'm doing a doctorate people still ask me how's the PhD going 😆 I think there a lot of misunderstanding out there outside of academia about what each entails.

Completely agree with this!

Academia is very toxic! I have a PhD and first hand experience!

If you don’t intend to work in academia then the prejudices of academics are, well, academic

DH did a DProff. He went into academia after a professional career and just got really into doing research. He was already an international ‘name’ in his field when he decided to do a doctorate and was advised to do it ‘by publication’ because he already had a substantial body of quality publications.
It was still flipping hard work and time consuming to do. He had to write a narrative (80k words) explaining the development of his research through publications and how it added to the body of knowledge in the discipline.
He still got loads of snobby comments about how it wasn’t a ‘proper’ doctorate, which was hurtful.
He’s a full Prof now, so what sort of Dr he was is largely irrelevant, and just goes to show that you don’t have to have a phd to be a competent academic researcher.

Sorry, forgot he had to do a viva as well.