The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 4 437 In the higher education literature, multiple studies have noted that location and proximity to home appears to be a fairly consistent reason for why prospective doctoral students, and later assistant professors, choose their doctoral programs and faculty positions, making recruitment from outside of a region difficult. Geographic location and proximity to home has been identified as the number one ranked reason for program selection in counselor education programs by master’s and doctoral students (Honderich & Lloyd-Hazlett, 2015) and in higher education doctoral programs (Poock & Love, 2001), and the second-ranked reason in marriage and family therapy doctoral programs (Hertlein & Lambert-Shute, 2007). Prospective students from underrepresented minority backgrounds appear to also consider the importance of community and geographic factors in doctoral program selection (Bersola et al., 2014). In a qualitative study by Linder and Winston Simmons (2015), proximity to family was an important factor in students choosing doctoral programs in student affairs. A qualitative study by Ramirez (2013) also found that proximity to home was a strong predictor of Latinx student choice of doctoral programs. Very few studies exist into candidate selection of faculty positions at the completion of a doctoral CES program. The published studies that do exist have similarly found that location is again a primary consideration for new assistant professors when selecting their first faculty position. Magnuson et al. (2001) surveyed new assistant professors in counselor education and found that location was a primary factor for more than half of participants. New assistant professors considered proximity to family, geographical features, and opportunities for spouse when selecting their first faculty position (Magnuson et al., 2001). In more recent studies in other academic disciplines, geographic location remained a strong factor (though not the most important factor) for why academic job seekers chose faculty positions in hospitality (Millar et al., 2009) and accounting (Hunt & Jones, 2015). In academic medicine, geographic location was again a key reason for why candidates from underrepresented minority backgrounds selected faculty positions (Peek et al., 2013). It is worth noting that in the Millar et al. (2009) study, international students ranked geographic location as less important than their U.S. counterparts, though they ranked family ties to region as more important. It is possible that the rise of online positions may make location less of a factor in candidate job selection today compared to years past. Follow-up studies are needed to examine the role of geographic location in candidate selection of in-person and online faculty positions. Although relatively few studies into the selection of faculty roles exist, location appears to be a consistent reason for why prospective doctoral students and later assistant professors choose their doctoral programs and faculty positions. Programs in regions with few doctoral programs may experience multiple layered challenges when hiring faculty. The master’s students in those regions have fewer options for doctoral study closer to home and therefore may need to consider leaving home and family to attend a doctoral program in a different region or attending a program with online or hybrid delivery options. Although online options are becoming more numerous, studies are needed to evaluate the frequency by which online doctoral graduates secure faculty positions versus in-person graduates, as this is currently unknown. It is possible that students may elect not to pursue doctoral study if they are unwilling to relocate, which potentially limits the pipeline of future faculty members who are originally from regions with fewer doctoral programs. Furthermore, doctoral graduates from other regions may have originally chosen their doctoral program in part because of geographical location, which may limit their openness to taking a faculty position in a region that has few doctoral programs. Thus, although counselor education programs in regions with fewer doctoral programs may need to hire candidates outside of the region, candidates from outside of the region may be less willing to move to a region with fewer doctoral programs. This may create difficulties for counselor education programs in regions with fewer doctoral programs that are seeking to fill open core faculty positions.
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