FISHERY BULLETIN: VOL. 70, NO. 3 



especially useful to the person who works after 

 earning a baccalaureate and then decides to ob- 

 tain more education for clearly defined reasons. 

 Thus, the demand for fishery scientists will 

 probably remain, as it has been, predominantly 

 for baccalaureates; and this demand will coin- 

 cide with the inclination of a majority of stud- 

 ents to earn no more than the baccalaureate. The 

 implications for the fishery educator seem clear 

 — prepare an undergraduate student for a job 

 if he intends to terminate his formal schooling 

 with a baccalaureate and prepare him for grad- 

 uate work if he plans immediately to work for 

 an advanced degree. "Preparing a student for 

 a job" does not mean training him extensively 

 in techniques that he could learn as well or better 

 on the job; rather it means preparing him as a 

 scientist and citizen so that he can choose among 

 a reasonable number of job alternatives and pro- 

 gress rapidly in the job that he finds. 



SURVEY OF OPINION REGARDING 

 FISHERY CURRICULA 



Opinions and criticism of fishery curricula are 

 frequently expressed by two groups of people, 

 both of which should be regarded as biased: fish- 

 ery faculty and employers. Fishery faculty 

 tend to be oriented toward basic research and 

 the necessity for doctorate degrees, which most 

 of them have. They may even suggest that per- 

 sons who get only a baccalaureate degree are 

 likely to be only research technicians. Employ- 

 ers are necessarily concerned with the immediate 

 problems of getting a job done and having em- 

 ployees who can do the job well with a minimum 

 of added training. They are usually less inter- 

 ested in the capability of a new employee to grow 

 in skill and take over major responsibility at a 

 later date. Consequently, it was deemed useful 

 to obtain opinions from others. 



During the spring of 1971 it was possible to 

 sample the opinions of members of the PFB with 

 respect to fishery curricula. Membership in the 

 organization, according to the bylaws, is "limited 

 to graduates of universities of recognized stand- 

 ing who possess a degree in the biological sci- 

 ences who are professionally engaged in fishery 

 biological research and who have completed at 



least one year's cumulative service in research 

 with some organization following graduation 

 provided that employment in an organization in 

 one of the following areas shall be necessary for 

 membership: Alaska, British Columbia, Wash- 

 ington, Oregon, California, Idaho, and Hawaii." 

 The organization included 751 active members 

 in May 1970, a considerable fraction of the esti- 

 mated 5,500 fishery biologists who were em- 

 ployed in the United States on July 1, 1970 

 (Martin, 1971).* The members were afl^liated 

 with one provincial and six state departments 

 of fisheries or fish and game, two Federal fishery 

 agencies, three Canadian fishery agencies, nine 

 nonfishery government agencies, seven nonfish- 

 ery industries with environmental problems, 

 twelve colleges and universities, and the Cali- 

 fornia Academy of Sciences (Table 1). Either 

 notably absent or scantily represented were fish- 

 ery scientists employed either in aquaculture or 

 in the fishing industry. Probably underrepre- 

 sented were fishery management biologists be- 

 cause of the requirement by PFB for profession- 

 al engagement in fishery research. Subject to 

 these qualifications the organization probably 

 represented quite fairly at the time the fishery 

 scientists in the western United States. Also 

 canvassed were persons on the mailing list for 

 the Northwest Fish Culturists Conference and 

 student groups at the University of Washington. 

 The opinions about most useful and least use- 

 ful subjects required somewhat arbitrary and 

 subjective classification of the subjects into not 

 more than 10 groups, as follows: 



0) Function and methods 



1) Biological sciences 



2) Chemistry, physics, and mathematics 



3) Natural resource sciences and management 



4) Social sciences 



5) Engineering and technology 



6) Administration 



7) Humanities and liberal arts 



8) Communications 



9) Other fields 



^ Martin, R. G. 1971. Potential employment market. 

 In Item.s for fishery scientists from the Sport Fishing 

 Institute. Jan.-Feb. 1971. 



684 



