Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, 136 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
Department of Physical Therapy, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA.
Phys Ther. 2021 Apr 4;101(4). doi: 10.1093/ptj/pzab030.
The Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education has introduced a requirement that 50% of core faculty members in a physical therapist education program should have an academic doctoral degree, which many programs are not currently meeting. Competition between programs for prestige and resources may explain the discrepancy of academic achievement among faculty despite accreditation standards. The purpose of this study was to identify faculty and program characteristics that are predictive of programs having a higher percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees.
Yearly accreditation data from 231 programs for a 10-year period were used in a fixed-effects panel analysis.
For a 1 percentage point increase in the number of core faculty members, a program could expect a decline in academic doctoral degrees by 14% with all other variables held constant. For a 1% increase in either reported total cost or expenses per student, a program could expect a 7% decline in academic doctoral degrees with all other variables held constant. Programs that have been accredited for a longer period of time could expect to have proportionately more faculty members with academic doctoral degrees.
Programs may be increasing their core faculty size to allow faculty with academic doctoral degrees to focus on scholarly productivity. The percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees declines as programs increase tuition and expenditures, but this may be due to programs' tendency to stratify individuals (including part-time core faculty) into teaching- and research-focused efforts to maximize their research prowess and status.
This study illuminates existing relationships between physical therapist faculty staffing, time spent in research versus teaching, and program finances. The results of this study should be used to inform higher education policy initiatives aimed to lower competitive pressures and the costs of professional education.
物理治疗教育认证委员会引入了一项要求，即物理治疗教育项目的 50%的核心教师应具有学术博士学位，但许多项目目前尚未达到这一要求。为了声望和资源的竞争，项目之间可能存在差异，尽管有认证标准，但教师的学术成就仍存在差异。本研究的目的是确定能够预测具有更高比例具有学术博士学位教师的项目的教师和项目特征。
在一项固定效应面板分析中，使用了 10 年间 231 个项目的年度认证数据。
在其他所有变量保持不变的情况下，核心教师人数每增加 1 个百分点，项目的学术博士学位人数就会减少 14%。报告的总费用或每名学生的费用每增加 1%，在其他所有变量保持不变的情况下，项目的学术博士学位人数就会减少 7%。已经获得认证较长时间的项目可以预期会有更多的具有学术博士学位的教师。
项目可能会增加核心教师的规模，以使具有学术博士学位的教师能够专注于学术研究。随着项目提高学费和支出，具有学术博士学位的教师比例下降，但这可能是由于项目倾向于将个体（包括兼职核心教师）分层为教学和研究重点，以最大限度地发挥他们的研究实力和地位。
本研究阐明了物理治疗师教师人员配备、研究与教学时间分配以及项目财务之间的现有关系。本研究的结果应被用于为旨在降低竞争压力和专业教育成本的高等教育政策倡议提供信息。
