Psychology graduate students now have access to 55 new APA-accredited internship slots, thanks to the accreditation of 11 internship programs that received funds from APA's internship stimulus package.
The new slots are among those created after APA's Commission on Accreditation accredited 17 internship programs in October. Eleven of those programs were internship stimulus grantees. The additional six programs will also provide a number of internship slots, but those numbers are not yet available.
APA's stimulus package began as a $3 million, three-year program to boost the number of APA-accredited internships for psychology graduate students. The stimulus allots up to $20,000 per program seeking accreditation to help pay for consultation, administrative and supervisor support, application and site visit fees, intern stipends and benefits, and other costs.
"We're excited by the progress the stimulus program is making," says APA Executive Director for Education Jim Diaz-Granados, PhD. "We are spending the funds well and we're getting the results we were hoping to get."
Since its inception, the program has led to the accreditation of 29 additional internship programs and about 158 new internship positions.
That said, there's still a lot of work to be done, Diaz-Granados acknowledges. In the 2015 internship match, only 68 percent of students actively seeking internships — not counting students who withdrew from the match or did not submit ranks at all — had access to positions accredited either by APA or by the Canadian Psychological Association, and 11 percent of applicants did not match at all, according to the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC).
That is, however, a marked improvement from 2012, when just 58 percent of students actively seeking internships had access to accredited slots and 22 percent of applicants didn't place at all.
In another effort to boost the creation of internships, APA is funding a fellow, Caroline Bergner, to advocate for and support efforts to reimburse internship programs for the services psychology interns provide under Medicaid. Obtaining that reimbursement "would make a huge contribution to [internship] program sustainability," for example by opening up sites that might not otherwise be able to have interns and allowing sites to expand their number of internship slots, Diaz-Granados says.
APA's stimulus program has also prompted other professional psychology groups to create their own stimulus plans. These include Div. 16 (School Psychology); APPIC; and the National Register of Health Service Psychologists, which is partnering with the American Psychological Foundation to raise at least $250,000 to help increase the number of accredited internships. The National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology has also developed such a plan.
Having sufficient high-quality internships for all graduate students is a win for everyone — students, the public and the profession, says APA Deputy Director of Education Catherine Grus, PhD.
"It is heartening to see that APA's investment in the internship stimulus program — and the efforts of other organizations on behalf of the next generation of psychologists — are having an impact," she says.
— Tori DeAngelis
To find out more about accessing funds to get your program ready for accreditation, contact Jackie Tyson, APA associate executive director for education.
