Why are PsyD's underrepresented in internship sites?

[skeptic07]

Ive been looking up internships on the APPIC site and it seems that the general acceptance ratio for PhD's to PsyD's is around 4:1 or 5:2 (ish). (This is also for the state of Texas specifically- dont know if this holds true for the rest of the nation, although I assume it's the same across the board)

Does anyone know why such comparison exists? Is it normal for most sites to favor PhD's? And importantly, do you think this trend will change in the future -say they next five years??

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[Ollie123]

I've heard it already has and some sites now favor PsyDs, but its very site-dependant and I expect it to remain that way. Western Psych and Palo Alto VA, would be two examples of places I expect will always favor PhDs over PsyDs (more research-oriented internships).

Really though, I doubt it will ever be equal until we see some massive overhauls of the education system here. Without trying to be the one who starts the inevitable flame war this will degrade into, let's just say that there are a huge number of PsyDs coming out of professional schools. Many of those schools have somewhere between low and non-existant acceptance standards. Past behavior predicting future behavior and all, its unlikely most of these students will become superstars in graduate school, especially when compared to students who already went through a very extensive weed-out process.

 

[JockNerd]

Looking at the APPIC database, it seems as through a lot of sites will list PhDs as "preferred" and PsyDs as "acceptable." It also seems as though many sites list both PhDs and PsyDs as "acceptable," but have put through 15 PhDs and 0 PsyDs in the last three years (from my own brief and completely non-empirical survey of a few sites on the directory, it seemed like university psychological service centres and student counseling centres were more likely to do that).

I think one potential problem is this: I've read about professional school programs and students really trying to sell that students will have x number of clinical hours (usually come four-digit-number) done by the time they apply for internships. However, in going over articles and papers to make sure I'm ready for internship applications (it's 3.5 years away, but I like to be prepared), I see over and over that once the minimum number of clinical hours (usually around 600 is my impression) is hit, other factors become much more important and having those extra 1400 clinical hours doesn't help the application.

I don't know if it would change.... more and more grads are PsyDs, but I was under the impression that there weren't big numbers of PsyDs rising to top positions at internship sites yet, since they more often set up group or individual private practice.