| Abstrakt: |
Thus, it would appear that the job boom (i.e., several jobs for each applicant) evident in our discipline during the mid 1960's, does not exist. It does appear, however, that there is, at present, a relative balance between jobs and new doctorates produced. By comparison with aggregate data which include other social science and humanities disciplines, the job situation in our discipline is much more optimistic than most. The trend noted previously in this paper with regard to increasing numbers of jobs and decreasing numbers of doctorates being produced (see Table I) indicates that the situation may look even brighter in the not too distant future. An important question is whether a one-to-one relationship between doctorates produced and jobs available is even desirable. Even though doctoral programs automatically screen out many weak candidates, there are several reasons to argue that any field is better served with a surfeit of doctorates: (1) Some weak candidates are still able to filter through. (2) Some who obtain a doctorate-in order to teach discover that they are not suited to teach. As we noted earlier, previous descriptions of the job market in speech communication have been rather pessimistic in recent years. Our intent in this paper was not to attempt to create an overly optimistic picture of employment opportunities—just to provide a more objective description of the current situation. It appears to us, on the basis of a re-analysis of previous data and the results of our survey of employment of recent doctorates in speech communication, that the job market has been improving steadily over the past four years, (e.g., an increase of SCA Placement Service listings by approximately twenty-nine percent). It is hoped that this trend will be examined closely by educators and administrators before judgments are made concerning the actual job market for doctorates in speech communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
