I still don't understand why it is that a PhD is required to teach at an undergraduate liberal arts college. Why does one need a research credential if one won't be training researchers or doing research? Let's not forget that before the PhD even existed, people with Masters degrees taught college, and people were just as smart and successful back then. Furthermore, why would a community college want a PhD? It doesn't make any sense to me considering that Community College is the farthest thing from a research university, and community colleges seem to place its greatest emphasis on teaching. Those of us who have been to college at any level know how terrible an academically credentialed person can be as a teacher. I actually think that in most cases the relationship between academic credentials and teaching talent is inversely proportional. There's become such hype about academic credentialing, when in actuality credentials mean very little as far as teaching ability goes. This also holds true for public school teachers that are required to get masters degrees. Why? One can be filled to the skull with theory and not have an idea of how to teach. I've taken classes with plenty of Dr.'s in education that had no idea how to teach at all. They were damned good researchers, though!

So, here I am - someone who has a BS in Physics from a good college, an MA in Education from an ivy league, and I can't get a job teaching physics at a community college, because I don't have a masters in Physics. Here's the kicker: every physics course taught at the community college level I've taught to high school students in very difficult circumstances, and my students did very well - 80% of them passed the calculus-based physics AP test (with an 80% or higher), the highest physics course offered at all of the community colleges I've looked at.

But I'm not allowed to teach full-time at the community college level, because I don't have some credential which is completely irrelevant to any courses I'll be teaching. Do I really need a graduate course in quantum mechanics to teach students about Newton's Laws and Freshman-level electromagnetism? Puh-lease.

This credential craze is just hype. It's keeping good teachers out of higher education and bad one's in.

I recently interviewed at a liberal arts college so that I might cover for one of their doctors that teaches calculus. Guess what? They took me. Why? Because of my extensive teaching experience. They were convinced because of my previous teaching experience with AP Physics: C that I could teach Calculus (I had to do it for the physics students), and they cared more about the fact that I could teach the material, not that I had taken 20 credits of math beyond Calculus.

Granted, in order to teach Calculus, someone has to have taken it and understood it. But does one need a Masters degree or PhD in Mathematics to teach Calculus? Many high school teachers teach calculus (and do it well)! It would be asinine for them to have required such a credential for such a job at the liberal arts college, and fortunately they saw this.

Now, granted, I understand that if I were to be hire full-time as a math professor at a 4-year college, a Masters degree should be required, But I still argue that a PhD is superfluous for all professoriate except those that will be teaching at a research university.