Baylor AuD Update

[Kevin M. Brownstein]

Just making sure everyone in this group is aware that Baylor has suspended 
admissions for its AuD program. The UNOFFICIAL word is that the students were 
not prepared to compete in medical school classes and only one of them 
received a satisfactory grade (does that mean the rest failed? I don't 
know). Just wanted to get a discussion going about where we're headed with 
this degree. Its beginning to be apparent that the infrastructure to offer 
this degree is lacking. I began my core classes for audiology in the summer 
following my second year of college. Let's face it...by then, most of the 
students in the core biology, physics and chem sequences have been weeded out 
to leave only qualified pre-med and other science rich majors. And I figure at 
that point, not many of these students who have succeeded that far are going 
to select a track leading to a 30-50K/year job....
As I see it, the underlying principle is to attract the new crop of 
audiologist (AuD holders) from the pool of students on a pre-med track. That 
sounds like a tough sell. I saw a quote from Jerger at Baylor saying that he 
wanted to hold up for a couple of terms until applicants were more qualified 
for the program. 
My concern is that we are not being sensitive to the demographics of the 
typical audiology student. How do we establish a science based curriculum to 
educate future audiologists without losing most to medical schools? Do we 
begin to offer a separate science curriculum, and push basic audiology courses 
back into the first year(s) of grad school? Its great that we want to reach a 
doctoral level in the profession, and there seems to be plenty of discussion 
about how to distribute the credentials once they become the norm. But there's 
much less discussion about how we get from here to there in the first place...
Kevin Brownstein
University of Florida