Recruiting Undergraduate Students: Creating a Path to the Counseling Profession

Counselor educators must find ways to encourage undergraduate students to choose to pursue a graduate degree in counseling. Related helping professions (e.g., psychology, social work) may have a recruitment advantage. Faculty in disciplines with both undergraduate and graduate programs can encourage high achieving undergraduate students to continue into graduate programs within their discipline. Due to the lack of a discipline specific academic pathway and an undergraduate advising system directing students into counseling graduate programs, counselor educators must find innovative ways to recruit undergraduate students. The authors will discuss the issues involved in recruiting undergraduate students, present a framework for sharing information about the counseling profession, and provide strategies for recruiting undergraduate students into counseling graduate programs

Motivations to Pursue the Doctoral Degree in Counselor Education and Supervision

Pursuing a doctoral degree in Counselor Education and Supervision (CES) requires a significant commitment. Although there is research on motivations to pursue a doctorate in general, there has not been a specific examination of motivations among those who have pursued a doctorate in CES, which warrants investigation given the diversity of training and potential career paths offered by the degree. In this Q methodology study, 35 students, counselor educators, and practitioners sorted statements pertaining to their motivation for doctoral studies in CES. The sorted statements were correlated and factor analyzed, resulted in four distinct motivations. The motivations are described and implications for CES are discussed