146 The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 2 about 50% had terminal degrees in counseling or counselor education. At the time of these counselor educators’ terminal degrees, CACREP did not stipulate that core faculty must have doctoral degrees in counselor education and supervision from CACREP-accredited programs. Even accounting for the grandfathering clause of 2013, a clear majority of the faculty in CACREP-accredited counseling programs now have doctoral degrees from CACREP-accredited counselor education and supervision programs (Hatchett, 2021). It is unknown whether this shift in the professional backgrounds of counselor education faculty will eventually impact the long-term trajectory of counselor educators at comprehensive universities. Implications for Counselor Education The results from the current study indicate that the typical counselor educator at a master’s-only counseling program at a comprehensive university will generate less than six journal article publications over the course of their career. Also, if these reported trends are stable across time, a significant minority will not attain any referenced journal article publications across their careers. These trends do not mean that counselor educators at comprehensive universities do not make meaningful contributions to the field of counseling in other ways, such as conference presentations, book chapters, grants, or evaluation reports (e.g., Ramsey et al., 2002). Also, as already mentioned, the electronic databases selected for this study and the study by Hatchett et al. (2020) do not capture all of the journals in which counselor educators publish. Nonetheless, it does reflect a relatively low level of original research published in peer-reviewed journals that is easily accessible through searching three popular electronic databases. The results from this study—combined with the typical occupational outcomes of program graduates—should have implications for doctoral-level training in counselor education. As previously mentioned, all graduates of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs are required to acquire numerous research competencies that will equip them for making original and meaningful contributions to the counseling literature (CACREP, 2015). Yet, most graduates of these programs do not attain faculty positions in higher education, and among those who do, relatively few will be employed at research-intensive universities (e.g., Lawrence & Hatchett, 2022; Schweiger et al., 2012; Zimpfer, 1996). Furthermore, based on the distribution of CACREP programs across the Carnegie Classification System, program graduates who do secure faculty positions will be more likely to be employed at master’s-level universities than at institutions classified as R1 or R2. It might be argued that the low rate of journal article publications produced by counselor educators at comprehensive universities is not problematic. Counselor educators at comprehensive universities spend proportionately more of their worktime on teaching and administrative tasks (Hatchett, 2021), and they often lack the institutional resources experienced by their colleagues at more research-intensive universities, such as access to research assistants (Henderson, 2011). Expecting counselor educators at comprehensive universities to do more research might be as fair as asking counselor educators at research-intensive universities to do more teaching and service (Hatchett et al., 2020). Yet, on the other hand, one should also consider what is being lost by the low levels of research found among many of the counselor educators at comprehensive universities. Many of these counselor educators are presumably not using the multitude of research competencies they developed during their doctoral-level training. The research training prescribed by CACREP is not just the means to a single end, a completed dissertation. One of the explicit training objectives of CACREP-accredited doctoral programs is to prepare program graduates to generate and disseminate new knowledge in the field of counseling (CACREP, 2015), an objective commonly discharged through publishing original research in peer-reviewed journal articles. The current study cannot resolve this conflict, but hopefully it will facilitate additional discussions on the value and role of research training in CACREP-accredited doctoral-level programs.
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