A lot of your questions can be answered in APA’s graduate study in psychology or insider’s guide. I’d consult these in addition to SDN.
Seconding this. The guides can be helpful starting points when you're trying to consider a broad range of programs and don't yet have a way of narrowing them down. The
Insider's Guide also has some information preceding the listings that can tell you about the process of identifying and applying to programs, and the listings themselves has self-reported information about the program, including clinical versus research emphasis in training.
Once you've looked through and identified potential programs, go to the individual program websites; the books are starting points but are not always the most up-to-date, especially if programs have undergone changes recently. With regard to your question about "good pass and match rates", the way you can find this information for individual programs is to look for the
Student Admissions, Outcomes, and Other Data. APA-accredited programs are required to post tables with information about:
- Time to completion
- Program costs - Note that this information is not reported consistently; some fully-funded programs will report their tuition as zero while others will report the actual cost of tuition but give you a tuition waiver when you matriculate.
- Internship placement - "Students who obtained APA/CPA-accredited internships" is what matters. Given that there are now more internship sites than applicants, you ideally want something 90%+. Also note the trend; if a program consistently is unable to place students in internships, then what's going on there?
- Attrition - Was there one year when a bunch of students left the program? Is the program consistently losing one or two students per year or every couple of years? There are many reasons why people leave programs, including personal ones that have nothing to do with the program itself, but a trend would be something to look into.
- Licensure - Some programs, especially research-intensive programs, will not have a 100% licensure rate if graduates go to academia instead of clinical practice. However, if a Psy.D. program whose stated mission is to train practitioners has a low licensure rate, then what's going on there?
- (Optional) Admission statistics - Not all programs report this table, as it's not required by APA but is instead encouraged by CUDCP. However, if this table exists, it reports number of applications received, number of admissions offers, number of matriculants, number of funding offers, and average GREs and GPAs. If you want something that's less competitive, then this table can give you information about that; however, speaking as someone who obsessed over this at some point, it's not as useful as one would think!
To show an example of what this looks like in real life,
this is from the University of Rhode Island.
As you're cruising through program websites, read the information in their about pages and in their clinical handbooks. A lot of it will all look the same at first, but those documents will tell you what a program values in terms of training, how they plan on training you as a clinical psychologist, and what you can expect, which can further guide where to send your applications.
Finally, a note on location: I can understand wanting to be careful about political climate. However, I agree with the others who have said that college towns tend to be liberal -- and psychology is fairly liberal, to boot -- but this is something that might be helpful to suss out by speaking with current graduate students. If there are specific things that concern you (e.g., gender, sexual, or any other minority status), then, depending on the cohort, you may or may not be able to find graduate students who can tell you what life is like as a member of that minority group. Regardless, students tend to be candid about what life is like or what they have observed if they're not of that minority themselves. Shoot them an email!