Doctor of Professional Studies  The Doctor of Professional Studies (or sometimes awarded as Doctorate in Professional Practice) (most commonly DProf, but also available as ProfD and DPS) is a doctoral degree for experienced professionals who wish to undertake a programme that is applied in nature and of practical value to their career. The DProf is based on applied research of real world problems. The DProf has been available to graduate students in the United Kingdom since the 1980s. The first Doctor of Professional Studies program was started in 1972 at Pace University. Although some consider the Doctor of Professional Studies to have similar academic standards and regulations as the PhD, it has a more practical focus. The first professional doctoral program was established in 1972 by Pace University in the State of New York in the United States. Other universities (see #List of Schools Offering Doctor of Professional Studies Degrees) around the world now offer the professional doctoral degree. Doctoral studies researchers, Gill and Hoppe, have reported rapid growth in professional doctoral degree programs outside of the United States. In the United Kingdom, professional doctoral degrees became established in the 1980s, when it was recognized that high-level programs were needed that were designed for experienced professional practitioners rather than for academic researchers. Many professional doctoral degrees in the United Kingdom are profession-specific and contain a mix of taught modules, research and a dissertation. Several universities that offer professional doctoral degree programs in the United Kingdom allow students to study part-time. In 2005, Powell and Long found that most professional doctoral degrees awarded in the UK were in the fields of engineering, educational and clinical psychology. They found that professional doctoral degrees in business and nursing were also emerging at that time. In 2010, Brown and Cooke reported an "explosion" of professional doctorate programs in fields such as the arts, architecture and computer science. In 2016, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) released a comprehensive study of professional doctorates which found substantial growth in these programs. Since 2012, the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE) has sponsored a bi-annual conference devoted to the study of professional doctoral education and related programs. In the United States, the DPS was once considered by the United States Department of Education and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be a research doctorate equivalent to the Ph.D. Along with the Doctor of Education, the Doctor of Social Science, the Doctor of Applied Science, and the Doctor of Library Science, the NSF no longer includes the DPS in its periodic Survey of Earned Doctorates (SEP) report, a statistical report on the number and range of research doctorates awarded in the United States.