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Shortage of Ph.D.’s in Special Education Is Expected in the Next 5 Years

September 14, 2011, 12:01 am

Not enough people are getting Ph.D.’s in special education, which could result in a shortage of qualified special-education faculty members, says a new report by researchers from the Special Education Faculty Needs Assessment project at Claremont Graduate University. The report, “Assessing Trends in Leadership: Special Education’s Capacity to Produce a Highly Qualified Workforce,” says that one-half to two-thirds of special-education faculty will retire within the next five years, which could leave 300 students with disabilities underserved for each missing faculty member.

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  • mvclibrary

    Boy, if this doesn’t have the ‘Massive Shortages of Humanities Faculty Expected within 10 Years’ ring to it, I don’t know what does!

  • archman

    Ah yes… another “PhD shortage”. That’s funny. I bet that the universities with special ed doctorates are plastering this all over their recruiting pages as I speak.

  • katisumas

    Oh I’m so amazed at the comments.  Such sensitivity!  Such caring!  Special needs human beings should be so grateful.  

    Of course the problem with the projected shortage in Special Ed faculty is moot.  If the commentators here have their way, those kids will not be  allowed  in our crumbling schools, they will not allowed to further clutter classrooms of 50 students for one  teacher (and why educate that teacher, I mean just get someone off the street to do that  job, right?). 

    Did you oh so wise Mclibrary and Archman also applaude when during the pseudo-Republican debate one of our candidate for  the presidency  opined that a sick person  who doesn’t have health care should be left to die, and  the audience applauded? 

    I might be unfair to you, but the fact is that there are  very few doctoral programs in Special Ed (info is just a click away), and already there are very few teachers trained by those PhDs and willing to take on this difficult job in k-12 schools (and willing to keep those underpaid jobs now they K-12 teachers are being demonized and blamed for the Great Recession brought about by unregulated Wall Street and the Bush taxes).  Without people to train them, there will  be even fewer of them.

    So yes, there is a glut of PhDs in other  fields, but that doesn’t preclude a  shortage in Special Ed, not to mention physics, math  and some other fields.  I can’t ask for compassion where there is none (so much of our society now seems to be  turning  into psychopathology) but how about a bit of logic and pragmatism before indulging in knee  jerk reactions? 

  • katisumas

    PS:  the article means that there are very few people in special ed grad programs.  It takes years to get a PhD so it’s easy to predict the shortage in 5 years. 

    Incidentally, teachers are leaving the profession.  If the overall job situation wasn’t so dire, there would hardly be anyone left to still do that labor of love under the demonizing that the profession is presently victim of. 

  • rhancuff

    I think you fail to see what the previous two posters (especially mvclibrary) are really pointing out: “shortages” in a particular discipline scares have been publicized before with very little actual shortage seen in the job market. I don’t think their comments actually have anything negative to say about special needs children, and nothing I read in those two comments says anything about barring special needs kids from school. You’re being more than unfair; you’re being dishonest.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    I agree.  I clicked on simply to muse whether this is like the nursing “shortage,” where there is a genuine lack of nurses (in some places), but since no one anywhere feels like bearing the costs of training anymore, there are oceans of newly minted, heavily indebted, unemployed nurses out there.  See also: law schools, business schools, liberal arts grads, non-elite STEM grads, civil engineers.

  • jffoster

    Why is the Ph D so necessary in Special Education?  Or is it? 

  • joejoe1

    This is GREAT! 

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