Clarification on MA and Phd

[Yanji]

it also matters if the program is online. For whatever reason, I have rarely found any online doctorate programs that allowed entry without a masters first- I'm going to guestimate that number to be >95% of the time. OTOH, on the ground doctorates almost never require a masters, it's more typical for you to go directly from undergrad to doctorate.

I agree with this. (although I'm not sure about the >95% part) I think the reason is that online PhDs are not designed for traditional academia-bound students and are for students with very specific mid-to-late career goals, which makes already having an advanced degree make more sense.

Master's degrees generally function as either stepping stone/consolation prize degrees on the way to a PhD or are professional degrees like the MBA/MFA. In many fields such as Economics, Engineering, Education, etc. a Master's degree can also function as a quasi-terminal degree for industry practitioners who require an advanced degree but are not involved in academia. The amount of time/effort required to complete a MA vs a PhD is huge. A bit of extra coursework (usually research seminars and the like) is only part of getting a PhD, which requires a substantial amount of research far beyond what is required for a MA thesis/capstone. There's a reason why most PhD programs are (at least partially) funded - the commitment is much bigger and extensive involvement in academia is required for at least a few years.