A study examined the relative prestige of university speech communication departments based on the published output of their graduates. All issues of nine major speech communication journals were examined for the period 1971 to 1981. Approximately 200 institutions were represented in the 3,771 entries in the data base; 90 percent of the authors held doctoral degrees. Analysis of the data involving authors with degrees in speech communication indicated that the University of Iowa's graduates had been the most active publishers, followed by Pennsylvania State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Illinois, and Michigan State University. When considered with data supplied by other researchers, these results indicate that regardless of the measure used to establish prestige, institutions housing doctoral programs produce more productive graduates. Although the presence of one or two prolific publishers and the failure to obtain some information on where the degree was obtained reduce the authority of these findings somewhat, this study does suggest that prestige, as measured by the number of articles published by an institution's graduates, does seem to index institutions. (Includes tables of data and institution rankings.) (JL)