Caldwell's doctoral work sits in the Ed.D. and Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, with three specializations: K-12 Leadership, Special Education Leadership, and Higher Education Leadership.
The distinctive thing here is not the formatting, which Caldwell keeps light. It is the sequence of dates after your defence, which is tighter and more prescriptive than most universities, and which involves a step many institutions do not have at all.
The two degrees
| Degree | Full programme | With master's transfer |
|---|---|---|
| Ed.D. | 90 credits | 54 credits |
| Ph.D. | 102 credits | 66 credits |
That transfer is substantial, a reduction of 36 credits in both cases, so the question of what your existing master's actually transfers is worth settling before you plan anything else. The difference between 54 and 90 credits is years.
Before the dissertation: the portfolio
Prior to the dissertation process, students complete a portfolio of assignments that best exemplify their ability to begin conducting a dissertation research study.
This is a gate, not a formality. It is the point at which the programme decides you are ready to start, so the assignments you keep for it should be chosen to demonstrate research capability specifically, rather than being whatever you happened to score well on.
The dissertation course sequence
Five courses, taken in order:
| Course | Focus |
|---|---|
| ED 740 | Dissertation Research I: Process and Product |
| ED 741 | Dissertation Research II |
| ED 742 | Dissertation Proposal Seminar |
| ED 743 | Dissertation Research III |
| ED 744 | Dissertation Research IV |
The dissertation is taught as a sequence rather than left as unstructured supervision, which is genuinely helpful. Use the Proposal Seminar in particular as the place to break a plan that is not going to work, because after that point changing direction is expensive.
The reader structure
Caldwell does not use a large committee in the way most doctoral programmes do:
Each student aligns with a first reader who oversees the entire dissertation process. Second readers are involved only for major revisions.
That concentrates a lot in one relationship. The upside is coherence: one person holds the whole arc of the work and you are not reconciling contradictory advice from four directions. The downside is exposure, because if your first reader is unavailable at a critical moment there is no second opinion built into the structure by default.
Practically: keep that relationship active and documented. Agree turnaround expectations in advance, and put the substance of verbal feedback into writing so there is a record of what was agreed.
The chain of dates
This is the part to understand properly, because every link is fixed and they run consecutively.
- Oral defence: the last day is six weeks before the end of the fall or spring semester, for a December or May graduation.
- Two weeks to complete the necessary changes and submit them for review by the first reader.
- On signed approval, submission to the Doctoral Program Coordinators.
- The student then forwards the dissertation to an approved editor.
- The entire process must be complete by a fixed date.
| Graduating | Everything complete by |
|---|---|
| May | 30 April |
| August | 1 July |
| December | 15 November |
Six weeks total, and three of the five steps depend on somebody other than you. Two weeks of it is your revision window, which leaves roughly four weeks split between your first reader's review, the coordinators, and an editor.
The defence deadline is the date the defence happens, not the date you ask for one. Scheduling a defence needs the availability of several people, so the real planning deadline sits weeks earlier again.
The approved editor
This step is unusual enough to call out. After your first reader has signed off, the dissertation goes to an approved editor before the process is considered complete.
Two practical implications. First, it costs money, and that cost arrives right at the end when many students have stopped budgeting for the degree. Ask the coordinators early what the approved editors charge and how far ahead they book.
Second, an editor at that stage is checking the document, not rescuing the argument. Structural problems are not what this step is for, and arriving at it with a draft that still needs rethinking means running out of calendar. The work should be substantively finished before it gets there.
Submission
Submission runs through the ProQuest ETD Administrator:
- Go to etdadmin.com and choose to submit your dissertation or thesis
- Select Caldwell and create an account
- Accept the publishing agreement
- Upload your files and information
All dissertations and theses must be submitted as a PDF. After you submit, the graduate school administrator reviews it before it goes on to ProQuest Dissertation Publishing, so there is an institutional check between you and publication.
Time limit
A five year time frame to complete and defend the dissertation.
This runs from the completion of coursework, so it sits on top of however long the taught portion took. For part-time students working alongside a career, which describes much of this programme's intake, that is the number to map out honestly at the start.
What Caldwell does not publish centrally
- No public formatting manual: no margins, font, spacing, page numbering or front matter order on the programme or library pages
- No stated citation style on those pages, though education doctorates conventionally use APA; confirm with your first reader
- No word count or page count for the dissertation
- No stated similarity or plagiarism-check threshold
- No published policy on generative AI use in dissertations
- No published embargo options or durations, nor fee amounts, for the ProQuest deposit
If you need the full text restricted while you pursue publication, raise it with the Doctoral Program Coordinators before you reach the ETD step, not during it.
Pre-submission checklist
- Master's transfer credit confirmed, so the credit total I am planning against is real
- Portfolio completed and accepted before starting the dissertation sequence
- ED 740 through ED 744 completed in order
- First reader relationship active, with turnaround expectations agreed in writing
- Defence scheduled well before the six week deadline, allowing for everyone's availability
- Revisions planned for a two week turnaround, not longer
- Approved editor identified and booked, with the cost budgeted
- Working backward from 30 April, 1 July or 15 November as appropriate
- Inside the five year post-coursework window
- Formatting and citation expectations confirmed with my first reader, since none are published
- Final document as a single PDF for the ETD Administrator
- Embargo discussed with the coordinators if I intend to publish from the work
Where to get help
The Doctoral Program Coordinators own the process and the deadlines. Your first reader owns the academic content and everything the published pages leave open, which at Caldwell includes most of the formatting detail. The library's research guides cover the ETD submission route, and the Office of Graduate Admissions can point you to the right person if you are not sure who owns a question.
If the writing itself is what is slowing you down, well before the editor stage, our thesis writing support works through it chapter by chapter with you.
