Employment and Attrition of Special Education Students Receiving Graduate Traineeships.

The article determines the extent to which special education graduates who received graduate traineeships are employed in position serving handicapped persons in the United States. The results of a survey conducted on every graduate student in the Special Education Department at Western Michigan University who received a traineeship between 1971 and 1979 are presented. The survey revealed that approximately 75 percent of the respondents were employed as special education classroom teachers following graduation with the majority in a resource room rather than in a self-contained classroom. These suggest that the utility of federal funds allocated to train personnel to serve the handicapped.