Psychology's Diversity Problem

To change the diversity makeup of the psychology workforce, educators must ramp up support and opportunities for students of color and break the bottleneck of obstacles the profession has created (2021).

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By Charlotte Huff

Nathalie Dieujuste recalls telling her seventh-grade science teacher, when asked about her career aspirations, that she wanted to become a psychologist because, “I just really want to know how the outside world affects your mind.”

But Dieujuste, who majored in psychology at Auburn University in Alabama, realized about a year before her college graduation that she didn’t know much about applying to graduate school. The first-generation Haitian American had only applied to a few colleges from high school. “I thought it would be a similar kind of process,” she said.

After asking for guidance from her research methods professor, Dieujuste learned that she needed research experience to be considered a strong graduate school candidate and quickly joined a university lab. About a month later, she saw a flyer for a mentoring program at Auburn for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) undergraduates called Scholars Committed to Opportunities in Psychological Education (SCOPE) and signed up.

During the intense weekend boot camp, Dieujuste realized that she needed far more research experience, perhaps as much as 2 years, as well as posters to present at conferences and publications with her name on them. “I had none,” she said. She also hadn’t yet homed in on her research focus, other than knowing that she wanted to study trauma and suicide. “I had no idea that I needed to further define that.”

Stories like Dieujuste’s are not uncommon. Psychology continues to wrestle with a diversity problem, and it doesn’t help that the road to earning a doctorate is so serpentine and costly that it’s difficult for even the most talented and dedicated individuals to succeed, according to researchers and clinicians committed to boosting the profession’s racial and ethnic diversity. Roughly 60% of Americans describe their heritage as non-Hispanic White, according to 2019 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That same year, 83% of the psychology workforce self-identified as White, 7% as Hispanic, 4% as Asian, and 3% as Black, according to APA’s Center for Workforce Studies data. Those numbers have not shifted much in the past decade; in 2009, 85% of psychologists identified as White. Still, the next generation of psychologists is shaping up to be more diverse; White students earned 69% of the doctoral degrees awarded in 2018.

To continue changing that picture, psychology faculty at all levels from high school onward should encourage more BIPOC students to consider the profession, better support those students’ development of the research skills and other experience needed to apply to graduate school, and provide guidance through the numerous evaluations and gatekeepers toward a doctoral degree, said Anissa Moody, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Queensborough Community College in New York and a member of APA’s Committee on Associate and Baccalaureate Education (CABE). The skills that students must acquire and excel at are almost too numerous to count, she said, including developing critical thinking, learning research methods and statistics, honing interviewing prowess, seeking out mentors, and producing posters and other publications.

“The path to becoming a psychologist has been very steep and thorny and created by the psychologist community,” Moody said. “It’s a bottleneck that we’ve created where only the most prepared, the most organized, those who have the most knowledge and the most resources are the ones who get through that bottleneck.”

Black and Hispanic/Latinx students enroll in psychology doctoral programs at rates below their composition in the general population, according to an analysis of accredited programs from 2005 to 2015 (Callahan, J. L., et al., Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2018). During that stretch, Hispanic/Latinx students made up 10.75% of doctoral students versus the 16.3% they comprise in the population overall, according to 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data. Black students made up 7.08% of those enrolled versus 12.6% overall.

The result can be a scarcity of culturally competent care for BIPOC patients who prefer to seek help from therapists who look like them. In the past few years, amid the very public examples of police brutality, Black psychologists report they are busier than ever. Directories of color have become increasingly popular to help Black and Latinx patients, as well as those seeking Asian and Pacific Islander therapists.

“To not have a discipline that reflects the diversity of the people that we serve, it really does a disservice to our profession,” said Kevin Cokley, PhD, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on the experience of BIPOC students in higher education.

“If we aren’t culturally competent as a profession, then we risk doing more harm than good by turning off BIPOC individuals from either seeking mental health services or, if we’re talking about education, discouraging them from even considering psychology as a viable profession,” he said.

Lost opportunities

Too often, psychology misses out on openings to entice talented BIPOC students into the profession, starting even before college, said Janice Haskins, PhD, senior director of APA’s Minority Fellowship Program. Overall, nearly 30% of high school graduates take at least one psychology course in high school, according to APA data on trends in precollege and undergraduate psychology. But those courses tend to be offered through honors or accelerated programs that are not available at every high school, Haskins said. “Many times, students of color are less often either recommended for those types of programs or have less access to them,” she said.

“So, right off the bat we experience a gap there,” Haskins said. “In terms of taking that honors curriculum where you’re really digging into psychology and getting into all of the interesting pieces of psychology, we’re already starting off at a deficit.”

Growing up, a lot of students of color, especially Black students, also may not have had the most positive or supportive encounters with psychologists, Moody said. “Their experience with meeting with a psychologist may [have been] as an authority figure in their schools who they were mandated to see regarding family issues or in ways in which it wasn’t necessarily a safe way to encounter or even consider yourself being in that role,” she said.

In other circumstances, high school or college students may never have encountered a psychologist who looks like them, or even have a broader sense of what the profession does, said Helen Hsu, PsyD, a staff psychologist, Asian American specialist, and lecturer at Stanford University. Their parents may be reluctant for them to consider such a career, particularly if they recently emigrated from a country that lacked much of a mental health system, she said. “So, of course they’ve never really heard of who does these jobs, or who goes to these services.”

Dieujuste, the first of her siblings to graduate college, only had one Black professor when she was attending Auburn. As it happened, the professor taught in the psychology department. “Seeing her, and her success, was meaningful for me in knowing that the goal I was trying to achieve was actually attainable,” Dieujuste said.

Bottleneck chokepoints

Even if students are intrigued by a career in psychology, the accumulating weight of debt starting in the college years can become a deterrent, said Mary Fernandes, a PhD student in clinical psychology at Georgia State University who chairs the university’s American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) committee.

The bills don’t just encompass the cost of tuition and living expenses, but possibly moving elsewhere for an internship and additional training, such as postdoctoral work, Fernandes said. In one survey involving more than 1,000 psychology graduate students and early career psychologists, the graduate students anticipated a cumulative total debt of $141,078, including undergraduate loans. Early career psychologists reported a debt load of $108,127 (Doran, J. M., et al., Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2016).

For BIPOC students, the lower likelihood of generational wealth can make such price tags even more overwhelming, Hsu said. At Stanford, she noted, some undergraduate and graduate students of color are working and sending money home to help family members elsewhere in the United States or their home country abroad while striving to stay on top of their grades.

Along with the financial hurdles, the skill sets required to get accepted into a doctorate program have become increasingly steep and multifaceted, placing “a lot of pressure at the undergraduate level to get students prepped and prepared,” said Moody. “But only certain environments are equipped and resourced to be able to provide that.” For instance, she said, Queensborough offers a research methods class, but that’s not a common option at community colleges.

And the rapid pivot needed in college to gain sufficient research experience and other skills for graduate school can be particularly difficult for some first-generation college students, such as those who are Latinx without proper guidance and mentorship, said Joaquín Borrego Jr., PhD, dean of the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University in Oregon. Many are living away from home for the first time and adjusting to the campus culture, he said. They are “just trying to navigate, just trying to survive, if you will,” he said, “and getting exposed to the college experience and learning to engage in needed activities that will best prepare them for graduate school.”

Some discrimination chokepoints may precede the formal doctoral program application process, as one field experiment illustrated. In the 2015 study, fictional prospective doctoral students from a variety of academic disciplines sent more than 6,000 emails to faculty members asking to discuss their research and ways they could get involved. By design, the students’ names were selected to indicate gender or race/ethnicity (Milkman, K. L., et al., Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 100, No. 6, 2015).

Two thirds of the faculty members responded. But across research disciplines, women and non-White students seeking guidance were more likely to be ignored. The worst rates across disciplines involved business, where women and non-White people were collectively ignored at 2.2 times the rate of White males.

Moreover, the reception was not any better if the faculty member contacted was either female or of the same racial or ethnic background as the fictional student. (The sole exception was students of Chinese heritage contacting faculty with the same ethnic background.)

An analysis published in 2018, which built off the Callahan study of doctoral program diversity, provided further indication that some students of color are getting lost in the transition to the doctoral program level. For instance, 12% of college psychology majors were Black, but they made up only 7.1% of those enrolled in doctoral programs (Luebbe, A. M., & Ogbaselase, F. A., Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2018).

A more formal effort should be made to figure out what’s happening, ideally by tracking a cohort of undergraduate volunteers interested in pursuing graduate education in psychology, suggested Borrego in a related commentary (Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2018).

He hypothesizes that the loss of diversity at the doctoral level reflects the fact that BIPOC students are applying to graduate school but not getting admitted. But without formal study, he said, it remains an outstanding question whether that’s true and, if so, what factors may play a role—whether that’s lack of mentoring, differences in GRE scores, or other influences.

“We need to really study the ‘why’ part,” Borrego said. “Why they were not successful if they were interested in attending graduate school and were not accepted into a program.”

Boosting success

Madison Silverstein, PhD, and two fellow graduate students developed the SCOPE program at Auburn in 2014 to help undergraduate students of color learn how to apply for a graduate program in psychology (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, online first publication, 2020). The program, which Dieujuste credits with providing crucial knowledge and mentorship, has been offered in various formats, from a weekend to a single day, and covers numerous skills, from polishing a curriculum vitae to completing mock interviews to searching for the best graduate program fit. It also provides strategies to reduce the cost of applying and attending, such as how to get application fees waived and locate grants and other funding sources, said Silverstein, now an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Loyola University New Orleans.

SCOPE, which is now led through a partnership involving Auburn, Loyola, and Emory University in Atlanta, joins other research boot camps and programs designed to reach BIPOC students. At Queensborough, Moody directs the Summer Intensive Research Program, a 3-week course for undergraduates who want to pursue further study in social sciences. APA runs initiatives and programs designed to improve recruitment and retention, including the Minority Fellowship Program, which APA launched in 1974 to assist graduate students, postdoctoral trainees, and early career professionals of color pursuing a psychology career. To date, the program has funded roughly 2,200 fellows.

Numerous APA governance committees have ongoing efforts to encourage more students of color to pursue psychology, including APAGS and the Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology Task Force (CEMRRAT2), which Cokley chairs. For instance, a work group recently created through the Board of Educational Affairs is looking at holistic admissions processes in academia for determining admission into graduate schools of psychology and will develop related recommendations. Meanwhile, the APAGS Committee for the Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Diversity (CARED) has launched a peer collaboration program designed to assist students of color with building support networks and collaborating professionally. Since 2018, the program has enrolled about 90 students.

After completing SCOPE followed by a dispiriting experience with her first GRE, Dieujuste delayed her plans to apply to graduate school and spent 5 years at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center, where she worked on research related to veterans’ trauma.

She took the GRE a second time but still wasn’t happy with her score. “It was OK, but it wasn’t what I felt like I needed.” But the pandemic provided an application breather, she said, as GRE scores were waived, allowing her research, publications, personal statement, and other materials to speak for her skills.

This fall, she starts at her first-choice program at the University of Denver, where she will pursue a PhD in clinical psychology, studying the developmental impact of early trauma and chronic life stressors on the physical and mental health of Black girls and women. She also was selected for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship totaling $138,000.

Guarding against attrition

Based on the current crop of doctoral students, tomorrow’s psychology workforce might be far more diverse. As of spring 2020, 43% of students pursuing a psychology doctorate identify as part of a non-White population, according to data provided by 955 doctoral programs through APA’s annual survey.

Still, Fernandes and others stressed that those involved with doctoral programs, from faculty through administrators, must take steps to guard against attrition by providing better emotional support, including mentoring, for students who may not look like them.

The 2005–15 Callahan data looking at doctoral program diversity found higher rates of attrition among some BIPOC groups. The attrition rate across that time span was 3.75% for Hispanic/Latinx students and 4.18% for Black students, compared with 3% for White students. Only Asian students left doctoral programs at lower rates than White students (1.8%).

“There’s a reason that it’s called a leaky pipeline,” Fernandes said. “Recruiting people from ethnic and racial backgrounds is wonderful. At the same time, you have to think about the ethics of recruiting an individual that you are not able to support once they get there.”

A 2018 APAGS survey of 147 graduate students from underrepresented groups, including sexual and gender minorities, found that 1 in 4 reported feeling isolated, according to the mixed-methods study, and 1 in 10 reported not feeling safe in their academic program.

“That is generally a much more pervasive experience than we might realize,” Fernandes said, regarding the feedback on lack of safety. “That means either not feeling valued by faculty or feeling worried about their identities having a negative impact on their ability to complete their studies.” APA’s Minority Fellowship Program strives to address the lack of support by providing training, mentorship and networking opportunities with BIPOC psychologists working in academia and clinical settings so that students of color can get the help they need, Haskins said.

In qualitative responses related to the APAGS survey, students talked about other ways to improve graduate education, including hiring more diverse faculty, expanding multicultural training beyond one course, and encouraging faculty to welcome students of all backgrounds.

Completing training relies on a lot of mentorship, guidance, and more subtle interactions, Fernandes said. “The traditional way of educating people is based on White norms,” she pointed out. “Even thinking about the term ‘professionalism’: A lot of what is considered ‘professional’ is based on how White individuals interact.”

Some students of color, Cokley added, encounter attitudes that are far worse and more overt. “Yes, there are some perceptional differences, there are issues of cultural fit,” he said. “Absolutely. But it’s beyond that. In some instances, it’s outright hostility and just straight-up racism.”

White faculty members should check in periodically with BIPOC students and not place the onus on those students to raise their concerns, Cokley stressed. Given the power differential between faculty and students, they likely won’t, he said.

“Taking the time to talk to students, to see how they are doing, to find out how their experience has been” is important, said Cokley, noting that this is something all faculty should be doing regularly. “If a BIPOC student is experiencing some sort of racial animus, hostility, or microaggression in the classroom or as a part of their educational experience, it would be so powerful if they knew they could talk about these experiences with White faculty.”

Dieujuste credits a lot of mentors along her path to starting graduate school, especially Silverstein. “She helped me form the direction that I wanted to go, even in terms of identifying more of what my research interest is.”

Dieujuste only knows of one other Black student already enrolled in the University of Denver’s clinical psychology program. Before classes even started, they started hanging out, and Dieujuste has reached out to other Black groups on campus.

“I will be one of very few in this environment,” she said. “I definitely wonder what kind of supports there will actually be for me as a Black woman in a program with not a lot of Black people.”