Models for reducing the demand for internships.

Abstract

Although considerable attention has been paid to increasing internship positions in an effort to solve the internship crisis, lesser consideration has been given to solutions that focus on reducing demand for available positions. Using program match rate data from Association for Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) over the past decade, I estimated outcomes for two strategies to reduce demand for internships: those aimed at increasing qualifications of internship applicants and/or their programs, and those aimed at reducing enrollments of doctoral training programs. Although immediate positive effects were observed for each strategy based on increasing the qualifications of applicants and/or their programs, effects on the internship imbalance would be negligible by the end of the decade. In contrast, methods to reduce enrollments of doctoral training programs were estimated to produce sustainable reductions in the internship imbalance over the same time period. I argue that a plan to reduce enrollments of all doctoral training programs, coupled with implementing a policy to limit access to the annual internship match to students from accredited programs, represents an effective and relatively palatable strategy to solve the internship crisis by the decades' end. Over 4,400 trainees in professional psychology doctoral training programs across North America registered to participate in the internship match sponsored by the Association for Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) in 2012, an all time record high. This notable increase in registered match participants would not be a source of concern, except for the fact that there were only 3,202 internship positions offered in the APPIC match in 2012. Even if all available positions were filled in the annual APPIC match (a state never achieved because not all registered participants apply to all available positions), no internship posi- tions were available for over 1,200 match participants. Although methods for securing internships outside of the APPIC match exist (e.g., the California Psychology Internship Council), the vast ma- jority of internship matches occur under the auspices of APPIC, either through its two-phase electronic match system or postmatch vacancy service. Using data from APPIC, Hatcher (2011b) illustrated the mag- nitude of the match imbalance (p. 218) that has escalated in a linear fashion for over a decade. Although the number of available internship positions has grown annually, the number of applicants registering for the match has increased at a higher rate, leading many professional psychology educators to declare this disparity a crisis (Hatcher, 2011a; Stedman, Schoenfeld, Carroll, & Allen, 2009). The professional psychology training community has not ignored this crisis and in fact has spent considerable time and effort exploring various strategies to reduce the magnitude of the internship imbalance. The efforts described by Grus, McCutcheon, and Berry (2011) illustrate several contemporary strategies to either increase the number of internship positions available or decrease the number of registered trainees. Despite significant effort exerted in solving this problem, the magnitude of the prob- lem has persisted. Indeed, if one examines the APPIC data as Hatcher has, these efforts have had no discernible influence on the trajectory of the prevailing linear trend. In this regard, it is time to consider enacting more dramatic solutions to the internship crisis. Failure to do so constitutes an ethical breech of our responsibility as a training community to provide resources for the next gener- ation of professional psychologists to acquire the professional competencies we promised them when they entered doctoral train- ing programs in professional psychology. The purpose of this article is to consider the influence of several potential solutions to the internship crisis and estimated outcomes in terms of solving the internship crisis. Using publicly available data from APPIC regarding annual match statistics and match rates for each doctoral training program over the past decade, future match rates were modeled for each of these proposed strategies, and will hopefully encourage a more informed response to solving the internship imbalance from the professional training commu- nity.