Addressing the Underrepresentation of African-Americans in Counseling and Psychology Programs.

Abstract

Over the last two decades, there has been an upward trend in the number of African-American doctoral students completing counseling and psychology programs. However, despite these trends, African-American faculty continue to be significantly underrepresented as counseling educators and psychology faculty. Similarly, counseling education programs continue to report challenges with the recruitment and retention of African-American faculty. Thus, the purpose of this article is to highlight the underrepresentation of African-American faculty in counseling and psychology programs and to discuss strategies for mentoring African American students into the professorate and retaining African-American counselor education faculty to create a sustainable pipeline for racial minority students. ********** As the nation's African-American population significantly increases relative to Whites (71% as compared to 7%, respectively; U.S. Census Bureau, 2004), it becomes even more important to build a diverse counseling and psychology faculty that more closely resembles and represents the demographics of the nation (Holcomb-McCoy & Bradley, 2003; Johnson, Bradley, Knight, & Bradshaw, 2007). Despite nearly three decades of affirmative action efforts and anti-discrimination legislation, counseling and psychology programs continue to report struggles and challenges associated with recruiting and retaining African-American faculty. Descriptive studies (see Antonio, 2002; Bradley & Holcomb-McCoy, 2004; Johnson et al.; Smith, Wolf, & Busenberg, 1996) reveal that approximately 3% of counseling faculty in CACREP-accredited programs identify as African Americans. In response to growing awareness of under-representation of African American faculty, scholars over the past 25 years (e.g., Atkinson, 1983; Brinson & Kottler, 1993; D'Andrea, Daniels, & Heck, 1991; Dinsmore & England, 1996; Lee & Arrendondo, 2001) have called for proactive measures and policies designed to recruit and retain faculty of color into counselor education. Yet despite such promising work, a vast majority of counseling and psychology programs remain relatively silent on this issue, making unclear the scope of the field's commitment to diversity. This silence, and the concomitant lack of scrutiny and/or complacency that it implies, is no longer acceptable to the academic African-American community (Young & Laible, 2000). The representation of African American is juxtaposed against an upward trend in the attainment of terminal degrees by African-Americans in these programs (Johnson et al., 2007; St. John, 2000). For instance, Johnson et al. revealed that of the 825 students enrolled in the 29 CACREP-accredited counseling programs that participated in their survey, 148 (17.9%) were African-American; 44 (5.3%) of which were men and 104 (12.6%) were women. In general, Johnson et al. suggests that African-American doctoral students are adequately represented in counselor education and psychology training programs (17.9%) despite their underrepresentation as counseling and psychology faculty. The disparity between increasing rates of African-Americans receiving doctoral degrees in counseling education and the underrepresentation of African-American faculty in counselor education programs raises questions as to the factors contributing to this disparity. There are unique opportunities for counseling and psychology programs to develop intentional and purposeful programs and initiatives to promote and encourage African-American students to seek professorship as a viable career option and begin to implement strategies for retaining current African American faculty in counseling and psychology education programs. Thus, the purpose of this article is to highlight programs in higher education that are effective in recruiting and retaining African American faculty and extrapolate key components and apply them to counseling training programs. …

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