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The Trump administration wants greater influence over college accreditation. Eliminating diversity and inclusion criteria from the admissions process is part of that push, which can have far-reaching implications in the coming years. But what does that look like in practice? As NPR's Katia Riddle reports, the answer may come in how we decide who gets to become a psychologist.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: For every slot in a clinical psychology program, there are a plethora of qualified candidates. Who gets selected can come down to tiny differences or preferences. John Dovidio is a psychologist at Yale. He has seen the admissions process up close over many years.
JOHN DOVIDIO: What that does is often leads us to the fact that you can have a white and a Black candidate who are just as good.
RIDDLE: For years, there wasn't explicit guidance around prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion, and psychology used to be a field dominated by white men.
DOVIDIO: You fall back on the heuristic of, this person's like me. I'm a good person. I'm going to take this person.
RIDDLE: In recent decades, the American Psychological Association made a significant effort to diversify the field. That's why their accreditation board started requiring graduate programs to take diversity into consideration when it comes to admissions. Aaron Joyce is APA's senior director of accreditation.
AARON JOYCE: The commission certainly sees individual and cultural diversity as a core part of what is required to be a competent psychologist.
RIDDLE: Not just race, but less visible factors like urban and rural geography or sexual orientation and identity. After Trump's executive order on DEI, however, graduate programs are feeling legal pressure to reverse course and eliminate it from their criteria. That's why Joyce said the psychology accreditation board has paused the requirement.
JOYCE: This was not a decision that was done lightly at all, and a difficult one.
RIDDLE: Joyce says the members of the accreditation board were worried they were putting graduate programs into impossible circumstances. If they kept the requirement, it could lead to programs losing accreditation altogether. He stresses that they are still emphasizing the importance of DEI in other ways. Melba Vasquez is a psychologist. She says she was among the first generation to benefit from this policy.
MELBA VASQUEZ: They were attentive to the importance in 1974, when I was admitted into the program, to start admitting students of color.
RIDDLE: Back then, it wasn't called DEI, but it had a similar impact.
VASQUEZ: I and a small number of other minority students over the next couple of years were admitted into the program.
RIDDLE: She's gone on to become a leader in her field. Diversity among psychologists is not about optics, she says. It's about better care.
VASQUEZ: It makes us more available to serve the populations and the communities that we live in, but we also can influence our colleagues to develop cultural competency to understand how to better deliver services to people from our communities.
RIDDLE: She's disappointed in this decision to pause DEI requirements in psychology programs, she says, but she acknowledges the difficulty. She doesn't envy her colleagues who had to make the decision.
VASQUEZ: I don't know whether I would have pushed for a different decision.
RIDDLE: In response to an inquiry about this story, the Department of Justice referred NPR to a memo promising the DOJ would, quote, "investigate, eliminate and penalize illegal DEI programs in educational institutions that receive federal funds," unquote. Vasquez says the commission on accreditation and the APA do not have the same resources as other institutions to fight something like this.
VASQUEZ: You know, we can't help but admire Harvard, for example, for standing up to, you know, the executive orders.
RIDDLE: Vasquez is hopeful the people who run graduate programs will continue to choose to prioritize diversity, even if it's not required when they select the next generation of psychologists. Katia Riddle, NPR News.
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