By Christopher Rzigalinski
Making the decision to pursue an Ed.D. or a Ph.D. in education is a major commitment, considering tuition cost, location, modality, time to completion, research interest, life circumstances and career goals. Career development pathways toward administration or tenure-track teaching positions are also important factors.
Like many doctoral programs, the Ed.D. in Higher Education Leadership and Policy offers opportunities for personal and professional growth, but what sets it apart is its emphasis on a holistic route to finding a sustainable career in the education field and a genuine vocation that motivates students to become their truest selves.
Ed.D. cohorts differ from Ph.D. cohorts in that Ed.D. includes practitioners from fields outside of academia. Leaders from business, tech, public service and other fields provide a robust and nuanced set of perspectives to the issues impacting the state of education and policy concerns. However, these practitioners are sometimes removed from strict scholarly practices that Ph.D. students grounded in intense academic research find more familiar.
My academic journey places me somewhere in the middle.
An Introspective Academic Journey
I gravitated to a life in academia because I wanted to cultivate a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me. My research journey started as an undergraduate with the guidance of Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 2010. Throughout the research process, he emphasized that research was an introspective process.
My graduate advisors at Rutgers echoed his advice, encouraging me to engage in critical self-study while working on my master’s thesis.
The need for introspection returned a few years later when I pursued an Advanced Certification in Museum Studies at New York University. There, another mentor prompted me to reflect on why I felt drawn to ancient yoga philosophy as a blueprint for making museum collections more inclusive in 2020, helping communities heal during the COVID-19 global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the next decade, I struggled to understand where me
began as I grew and evolved with the world around me. Through researching and writing, I continued to reinvent myself.
As I evolved as a professional, I evolved as a scholar. During my master’s program, I was also preparing to enter a Ph.D. program and work toward a career as a tenure-track professor. I took on dual adjunct roles for the Department of American Studies and the Department of English at Rutgers, teaching music history and multimedia composition courses. The following year, I earned a teaching assistantship and admission into the Ph.D. program in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. But after visiting the campus in Evanston, Illinois and meeting my would-be mentor, I felt something was missing. I declined and chose to broaden my search for what was next.
My Path to an Ed.D.
Another decade passed. I found new interests and moved to Los Angeles to pursue my dream of becoming a talk show and podcast host. That decision resulted in an opportunity at Condé Nast College in London to study multimedia journalism with staff members from Vogue and GQ magazines. When family circumstances brought me back to the U.S., I accepted a position with the rapid response collection program at the New York Historical Society (now The New York Historical) in Manhattan, where I met my wife.
During this time, I began working with CourseHorse, an EdTech startup. As the VP of Client Experiences, I customized team-building and educational experiences for groups from Google, Apple and Peloton as well as several universities. More importantly, working in the EdTech space reinvigorated my passion for higher education.
As life returned to normal after the height of COVID, news coverage focused on the financial and resource losses at universities and museums. Community colleges, however, were not mentioned in those same conversations. I wondered how grassroots spaces such as these, which the country needed most, had become an afterthought.
In March 2023, I received a job offer from Austin Community College (ACC) in Austin, Texas to serve as an academic advisor. Coming from the adjunct side of higher education, I was nervous about taking on a staff position for the first time. But knowing it was my chance to make a difference, I jumped at the opportunity. Soon, I began participating in several cross-departmental projects that united the college.
The colleagues and mentors I admired most had one thing in common — they held Ed.D. degrees. They had the acumen of the research-focused tenure-track faculty I worked with at Rutgers combined with the added strengths of higher education-focused administrative prowess and indomitable entrepreneurial spirits I recognized from CourseHorse’s startup environment.
My mentors were also involved in the community outside of campus borders, developing programs that supported students from various socioeconomic, cultural and economic backgrounds. Two of my mentors at ACC — Vice Chancellor of Community and Government Affairs Chris Cerini (Ed.D. ’22) and Head of Product at ACC Andrea Kehoe (Ed.D. ’22) — are College of Education alumni who praised the Executive Ed.D. in Higher Education Leadership program, encouraging me to apply.
After reaching out to Dr. Joe Wilcox, the program director, to learn more about the application process, we talked at length over the next two years about how the Ed.D. program differed from the College of Education’s Ph.D. programs. He showed me how each pathway would inform my career interests in administration, publishing scholarly articles, teaching undergraduates and developing service-learning student leadership programming. Finally, I applied and was offered admission in 2025.
My Journey Comes Full Circle At COE
I ultimately chose the Executive Ed.D. program in Leadership and Policy because it offers the personal and professional experiences I want to explore. Launched in 2019, it was designed for working professionals. Students take courses on Fridays and Saturdays, unlike Ph.D. programs which often require students to leave their jobs to take courses full time. By the time I enrolled, I accepted a new position as Austin Community College’s Service Learning and Community Engagement Specialist. Working at ACC while thinking about research projects was strategic, in addition to being practical.
In my research, I was inspired by Thomas Deiner’s book, Growth of an American Invention, the first comprehensive history of junior and community colleges in the U.S. The author argues that community colleges are a product of the community … a means for the community to examine itself, its strengths and weaknesses, its aspirations.
My goal was to leverage my access to ACC’s rich tapestry of students, faculty and staff to develop and implement initiatives that holistically support our communities in the Greater Austin area. Moreover, I knew that earning the mentorship of thinkers like Dr. Richard Reddick, who moved with equal proficiency between both sides of the scholar-practitioner divide, would help me grow into the leader I wanted to become. I still wondered, however, how I would make sense of my past as a traditional academic with the open-ended future that awaited me up the administrative ladder.
My journey came full circle during our Proseminar, the Ed.D. orientation event. One of the first articles we read was Erin Doran’s An EdD in a PhD World: Developing a Scholarly Identity in a World that May Not Always Recognize You as Legitimate (2021). Doran’s personal narrative paralleled mine, an academic focused on earning a Ph.D. who ultimately pursued an Ed.D. She confronted the misconceptions that Ed.D. programs aren’t as academically rigorous as Ph.D. programs.
Doran also challenged the prejudicial attitudes that Ed.D. programs fail to adequately prepare students for careers in professional academia and offered powerful advice that scholars should own their knowledge, voice and contribution.
When reading Doran’s article, I reflected on how much I benefited from the diverse perspectives that my research mentors held because of our different backgrounds.
My mentors guided me through my research processes by holding mirrors up to my personal experiences uniquely preparing me to become a more compassionate researcher and leader.
Had I not experienced the winding personal and professional roads to arrive at the Ed.D. program, I could never have fully appreciated it. I had to earn the life experience of failing, transitioning, learning and discovering myself to begin to understand what it meant to be a responsible scholar-practitioner.
