Odds of Hanging On

Odds of Hanging On

...And staying in the business? Consider that people are living longer, even though their organs—including the ones used for hearing—are wearing out, and we haven't seemed to come up with a way to make those two facts come together. Even if you, as an audiologist, deal solely with the elderly, you'll have a thriving practice and a never-ending supply of patients.

And why is that? Because the average life span of an American baby born in 2000 is—drumroll, please—seventy-five years for women and sixty-eight years for men. In 1930, a scant seventy years prior to that, life expectancy for women was forty-nine years and forty-seven years for men. It's just a guess but it's probable that when those people died, they could still hear pretty well.

And, of course, with the invention of earbud headphones and speakers at concerts designed to blow out eardrums during the first opening bars of a song, you'll always have young people as patients, too.

So...the odds of hanging on are good. Really good. Good for you.