We Have Seen the Future, But Is It Us? The Vocational Aspirations of Graduate Students in Counseling Psychology

In a recent article, Fitzgerald and Osipow documented a trend away from academic settings and vocational psychology and toward private practice and more clinically oriented tasks (such as long-term psychotherapy) among members of Division 17. In this study we extended the exploration of this issue by examining the vocational aspirations of a national sample of graduate students in counseling psychology, using similar methodology. The results document the increasing "professionalization" of counseling psychology, as well as the continued diminution of vocational psychology and career counseling as salient characteristics of the discipline, and are discussed in terms of the pragmatics of the marketplace and possible negative impact on clients.