Methodology: Best Doctoral Programs in Counseling Psychology

For this ranking of the top doctoral programs in counseling psychology, a list of American Psychological Association (APA) accredited Counseling Psychology programs was gathered from the APA web site. From this list of over 70 schools, each program's web site was searched for "Student Outcome, Admissions, and Other Data." From this data, that is required by the APA for accreditation, the program costs (in-state and out-of-state tuition) were gathered as well as the licensure percentage. The licensure percentage is determined by taking the total number of program graduates between 2-10 years ago and comparing the number of these graduates that became licensed in the past 10 years. Schools were then ranked on their licensure percentage, high to low. When schools licensure percentage caused the schools to tie the tie was broken by using a second tier ranking. For the second tier ranking, we took the data provided on the mean number of years to complete the program (data from 2007-2014). Higher ranking was given to schools with the lowest mean time to complete the program. If a school did not list data (which occurred in two instances) they were given the low ranking in the subset.