(PP201) Analysis of the Four-Year AuD Degree and Audiology Income, Benchmarked to Other Health-Care Professions

 In the first decade of the 21^th Century, the profession of audiology changed the academic degree requirement from the master’s degree to the doctoral degree. This poster addresses two important questions about the degree-transition process. (1) Is the rate of change in audiology income in the doctoral degree era different than in the master’s degree era? (2) How do current earnings for the audiology profession, with a doctoral degree requirement, compare to other healthcare professions with associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree requirement?

Summary: 

Purpose/Rationale: There are many reasons for, and consequences of, our decision to transition from the master’s degree to the doctoral degree educational requirement. Some of these are talked openly about, such as the need to increase the educational process from three years to four years along with the positive consequence of a new workforce with improved knowledge and skills. Some of these are not openly talked about, such as whether the degree transition process has changed audiology earnings or placed audiology on par with other doctoral degree healthcare professions. The purpose of this research is to generate accurate information concerning the two research questions. The rationale is to provide information to the profession, the profession’s leaders, and the profession’s decision makers, to assist in planning for our future.

Methods: This poster is a continuation of the work by Bray & Amlani, which has produced two pre-COVID podium presentations in 2019 and two poster presentations at AAA in 2021, of which was recognized as the Professional Poster Award Winner in the LEPI category. For this body of work, there are multiple data sources, including AAA, ASHA, BLS, CMS, CAPCSD, DataUSA, Federal Student Loan Program, and the HES reports. For the first question, this poster replies primarily on BLS data on audiology from 1999, when the profession first appeared in the database, to present. For the second question, this poster relies primarily on current BLS data across all recognized healthcare professions with clearly defined degree requirements. Statistical analysis of the data uses ANOVA and post-hoc comparisons.  

Results &

Conclusions: A preliminary look at the data in questions (1) and (2) can be found in Figures 1 and 2, respectively, of the AAA 2021 poster on “Historical Trends in Audiology Income.” Regarding Figure 1, this new poster will directly compare wage growth in the 20^th century (master’s degree era) to the 21^st century (doctoral degree era) alongside possible changes in wage growth in similar professions. Regarding Figure 2, this new poster will expand the number of healthcare professions in the analysis by including those with BLS tracking that began after 1999. The results will also be evaluated for master’s and doctoral degrees with respect to the characterization of the profession as allied health, practitioner, or limited license physician.

Importance of Work: Serious questions have been raised by some in audiology leadership (see Freeman and Windmill publications, for example) that the profession of audiology is not prepared, or preparing, to meet the future public health needs of the country. These questions resolve around recruitment of audiology students, graduation rates of audiologists, retention/attrition rates of working audiologists, working longevity of audiologists, and retirement rates of audiologists. This poster is a continuation of the work by Bray and Amlani to gather factual data on the profession with a long-term goal of developing a working model to predict future audiology employment as an evidence-based approach toward making decisions on management of our workforce and profession.