The article focuses on the human resource crisis in social work education in the United States. In November 1991, the Task Force on Social Work Research issued its now widely acclaimed report entitled "Building Social Work Knowledge for Effective Services and Policies: A Plan for Research Development." Sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, this report declared the existence of a "crisis" in social work research. In September 1998, a follow-up report was published. Entitled A Report on Progress in the Development of Research Resources in Social Work, it appeared under the aegis of the Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research. Notably, the latter organization did not exist at the time of the 1991 report, rather, it was established as a result of that report. The presumed advances made by a profession, or any other societal group, cannot be understood fully by merely analyzing absolute gains on a single dimension. Rather, putative "advances" must be evaluated in relative terms. On this basis, there is reason to conclude instead that social work education faces a largely unrecognized and underestimated crisis of major proportions. Concomitantly, a growing disparity exists between the numbers of educators who generate research-based knowledge for social work and the practitioners who seek such knowledge. In relative terms, then, social work education may be in a much weaker position today than it was in 1991.