Prospective Students
As you apply for admission to our program in Communication Disorders you should seriously think about the following important factors:
* You must go on to graduate school and complete your masters degree to obtain employment in the full range of work settings in our field (e.g., hospitals, private practice, rehabilitation centers, public school systems).
* The job market for those earning masters degrees is currently excellent and is projected to remain so for the next few decades. The job market for those holding the bachelors degree is very limited and confined to positions as speech pathology assistants and a few states that will hire bachelors level clinicians in the public schools.
These types of positions should not be considered good terminal career goals.
* Competition for admission to graduate school in Communication Disorders is more intense than for admission to undergraduate programs.
* We do not presently have data on students who successfully gain entrance to graduate school after they leave Auburn University; however, some national figures generated by the Council of Graduate Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders go as high as 75%.
* There are some 225 graduate programs in Communication Disorders in the United States accredited by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; however, the competition for admission is high in all of them.
Students approaching graduate school should apply to as many programs as possible to insure acceptance somewhere. Do not just apply to Auburn or one or two other places.
The competition level of acceptance to graduate school usually is relative to the status and size of the university. That is, smaller programs with less prestige will be less competitive than large, well-known programs.
* A student who attains a GPA of over 3.2 and a combined score on the verbal and quantitative subtests of the Graduate Record Examination of over 900 should stand a reasonable probability of gaining acceptance to graduate school in some program. Students should consider taking the GRE early so that they have the opportunity to retake the examination and improve their score if it is not high enough.