Reconceptualizing the Internship Shortage


The internship shortage is seemingly intractable.  Below is  the link to an article from the New York Times by Joseph Berger outlining the problem, and following is the abstract from a think-piece by Bob Hatcher, published in the most recent edition of TEPP.

Editor

 

Intern Gap Frustrates Clinicians in Training
Joseph Berger

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/health/views/internship-shortage-frustrates-psychology-students.html



The Internship Supply as a Common-Pool Resource:

A Pathway to Managing the Imbalance Problem

Robert L. Hatcher
City University of New York
 
The shortfall in internship positions available through the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers’ matching process has left doctoral students in professional psychology in a painful bind: take an internship outside the match, or fail to graduate. The quality of education suffers, as does the quality of the profession as a whole. This crisis has worsened as the years go by, and no effective remedy has been found. A widely celebrated literature on the management of scarce but renewable resources has developed over the past 25 years, and it offers a path toward understanding and solving this problem. This literature points to the need, and helps conceptualize the methods, for the educational community in professional psychology to take greater responsibility for the quality of the internship in particular, and for the quality of our graduates’ education and competence more generally.