APA’s new Guidelines on Equitable and Respectful Treatment of Students in Graduate Psychology Programs aim to promote ethical educational practices for the next generation of psychologists and to give psychology programs a road map for fairness, equity, and respect.
Approved by APA’s Council of Representatives in February 2023, the educational guidelines are the first on this topic released by APA, an effort motivated by the importance of graduate education in introducing future psychologists to the career. The process of penning them began in 2015 with the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) and the Board of Educational Affairs (BEA). The final educational guidelines were strongly influenced by many of the sociopolitical events that occurred during their development, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. As educational guidelines, not clinical practice guidelines, the document is intended to act more like a starting point for conversation in programs rather than a rigid checklist to follow.
“These are aspirational but hopefully will become less so over time,” said Erica Wise, PhD, a clinical psychologist and clinical professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former BEA member, and cochair of the guideline task force. “We’re hoping they will be like a framework, and that people will adopt and share resources about how they’ve implemented them.”
The guidelines—intended for use by anyone overseeing graduate education—are organized into four dimensions, spanning the individual level to the societal level: support for graduate students, policies and procedures, professional socialization, and social and political responsiveness. The guidelines in each dimension are written with the awareness that graduate school is a defining life stage that can be either a time of meaningful growth for students or a time of damaging stress.
“It’s a complex and beautiful relationship when it works,” Susan Opotow, PhD, a social psychologist at City University of New York and the current chair of BEA, said of the relationships between faculty and students. “And it can be a fraught and terrible experience when it doesn’t.”
Supporting graduate students
The first of the four dimensions of the educational guidelines calls on programs to support the physical, psychological, and financial wellness of graduate students. This includes providing students professional support and creating an environment of personal and psychological safety.
In the name of promoting physical and psychological wellness, graduate schools can combat some of the perceived barriers to health care for graduate students by aiming to provide access to affordable health insurance and by sharing resources for mental health treatment as well as accessibility resources for students with disabilities (Klein, A. B. et al., Training and Education in Professional Psychology, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2023opens in new window). This generation of graduate students is under a lot of stress, both financial and otherwise, Wise said. “We need to both build in learning to care for yourself and provide an environment that really fosters self-care in graduate training,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose very valuable students who are the future of psychology.”
Faculty and administration can consider sharing their own self-care strategies and show respect for the challenges graduate students face, according to the guidelines. They can support students who are navigating their personal paths, knowing that any guidance they can provide will likely have lifelong benefits.
Also key is recognizing the need for financial support. Money is a major stressor for many graduate students; something as simple as having to pay in advance to attend a conference (with reimbursement only after the event) can put a huge amount of strain on students. When feasible, the educational guidelines urge paying for costs up front rather than requiring a reimbursement process; programs are encouraged to provide emergency funds or referrals to community resources for things like food, housing, and medical care.
Tiffany Parisi, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, and the past chair of APAGS, said programs can help by prioritizing transparency. At Fielding, she said, clinical psychology faculty member Daniel Holland, PhD, MPH, provides a financial literacy seminar for graduate students to walk through the realities of student loans and what finances look like throughout the internship, postdoctoral fellowship, and early career stages.
“Those have been so well attended,” Parisi said. “It really speaks to a faculty member identifying a need and a gap and stepping in to provide information and support.”
On an individual level, programs can consider offering the professional resources their students need, ranging from adequate physical workspaces to technology to professional development opportunities. Faculty and staff could also consider ways to create an overall environment of interpersonal safety and respect, including by modeling ethical behavior and demonstrating integrity and compassion. “We have to think about psychological safety as something that needs to continuously be cultivated and nurtured,” Parisi said.
Policies and procedures
The second dimension of the educational guidelines, covering the policy level, encourages programs to strive for transparent, fair, and consistent policies—in a system in which students have a say in the process of creating those policies.
“We need to empower students in advocating for their own treatment in their graduate programs so that they can thrive,” said Quincy Guinadi, PsyD, the current chair of APAGS and a recent graduate of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.
Programs might consider ways to commit to enacting equitable and inclusive policies and to address problematic policies when issues become evident. Communication and dissemination of information around program rules and requirements are also key parts of this section of the guidelines; programs are encouraged to provide students written information as much as possible to avoid informal, inconsistent application of expectations. For example, it is important to make deadlines and evaluation criteria for courses clear.
The educational guidelines encourage programs to protect their graduate students’ freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, and due process rights, and to develop clear procedures for reporting grievances. Sometimes the impact of policy is not immediately apparent to faculty and administration, said Blanka Angyal, PhD, a counseling psychologist at the Audie L. Murphy Memorial Veterans’ Hospital in San Antonio who cochaired the guideline task force with Wise. But responsiveness to student concerns can clear up issues.
For example, students training at their university counseling center cannot also use that counseling center for their own mental health needs, but faculty in Angyal’s program listened to student voices and set aside funds for community care access. “Faculty are sometimes the first ones to be aware of what some of the challenges and struggles are,” Angyal said, “and may need to step into an advocate role and adjust policies and procedures to center their students’ personal and professional development.”
That’s why the educational guidelines urge programs to find ways to include students in policy establishment. “This point really encourages programs to take a bottom-up approach, where they take input and feedback from students,” Guinadi said.
Some examples include having seats for students on hiring committees for new faculty and on program executive committees that oversee curriculum and scheduling. It is best to reserve several seats for students on such committees, Opotow said, so that one student is not charged with acting as the sole student voice for the entire program. Student representatives can also be included at faculty meetings where important decisions are made, said Rosanna Breaux, PhD, a clinical psychologist and director of the Child Study Center at Virginia Tech.
Professional socialization
Because of the importance of professional identity to psychologists, the third dimension of the educational guidelines calls for explicitly acknowledging the need for professional socialization for trainees. This involves modeling professional involvement, providing advocacy training for students, and offering graduate students feedback on their progress toward their professional goals.
Mentorship is a crucial aspect of professional socialization. Programs can encourage productive mentoring relationships and hold mentors accountable for responsibilities to their mentees by establishing a process to address the problem when mentors fall short. “[Mentorship] is particularly a salient point for first-gen college students in terms of learning what it means to be a psychologist, how do you show up in the world, how do you navigate this community?” said Parisi, a first-generation student herself.
Mentorship relationships are one area where inequity can easily creep in, especially given that graduate programs are often so siloed and there is little oversight into whether mentors are prioritizing their mentee relationships, said Briana Brownlow, PhD, a clinical associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. Mentors “really have a make-or-break role,” Brownlow said.
One way to ensure these relationships will be beneficial is to require mentorship contracts, said Breaux. These contracts, she said, can cover everything from student goals to expectations for responding to emails to how the student will manage self-care.
“It puts it on the mentors to be the ones having those difficult conversations so that the students, who are the ones not in a position of power, aren’t having to be the ones to raise those concerns,” Breaux said.
The educational guidelines also suggest that programs consider peer mentorship programs, which can strengthen professional networks for students and provide another source of personal support.
Social and political responsiveness
The final dimension of the guidelines highlights that students are not just trainees in a program but humans living in a complicated world. This subsection encourages programs to make visible the sociopolitical context surrounding education.
Doing this involves committing to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police in 2020 underscored how much students need responsiveness from their faculty and mentors about large-scale sociopolitical events, Wise said. The pandemic also brought up issues of inequality that informed this section, she said. Though many of these events are, by their nature, politically sensitive, there are often ways to acknowledge their impact on students rather than remain silent, Wise said. For example, she recalls that in 2016 when North Carolina passed House Bill 2, colloquially known as the bathroom bill because it prohibited people from using single-gender bathrooms that did not match the sex listed on their birth certificates, the University of North Carolina’s LGBTQ center disseminated a map listing single-seat, non-gendered bathrooms around campus, an acknowledgment of how the new law might be affecting students. (The bathroom portion of the bill was repealed in 2017, and the rest was repealed in 2020.)
Faculty may not always see responding to big-picture events as part of their job, Breaux said, but this segment of the educational guidelines challenges programs to think about how to go beyond lip service and meet students where they are.
Almost all universities are already doing some of the things discussed in the educational guidelines, Breaux said, but what is often lacking is the knowledge of what is working and information sharing between institutions. Ideally, she said, the existence of the educational guidelines will help frame those conversations around implementation across programs.
As higher education has lost funding over the last decade, and as more first-generation students are—fortunately—entering psychology, later-career professionals may not always grasp the struggles their students are facing, Angyal said. One goal of the guidelines is to spark conversations between generations of psychologists so that trainees get a leg up on facing these challenges. Programs can also use the educational guidelines as a road map for internal conversations about their goals, Guinadi said.
“We hope that programs will take time to use these guidelines to assess whether their programs are equitable and respectful toward students,” Guinadi said. “It benefits programs, too, because we know that when students study in a conducive, supportive, respectful environment, they thrive. They become great psychologists.”
