Creating New Capacity through Postgraduate Selection

The selection of students into professional training programmes in psychology has implications not only for the quality of psychological services provided, but also for the psychological wellbeing of the South African population as a whole. This is reflective of broader social challenges related to questions of equity, redress and social justice. This article provides a critical evaluation of the extent to which institutions of higher learning in South Africa have, over the past 10 years, developed processes and adopted structures in order to align their selection criteria and procedures with developments taking place in the broader South African context. In order to contextualise this discussion against a background of selection trends over the past decade, a small survey of selection practices and intake figures in eight clinical training programmes was conducted. Quantitative data, in the form of intake figures broken down into ‘race’ and gender categories, were analysed for trends, and a thematic cont...