Increasing the representation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour as students in psychology doctoral programmes

There have been persistent calls for increased representation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) in all aspects of the psychology workforce. For equity to occur in the profession and delivery of services, there must be equity in access to graduate-level training in psychology. In this article, we discuss systemic racial inequity in access to Canadian psychology graduate programmes. We reviewed literature to investigate admissions evaluation criteria for racial bias using the University of Ottawa, School of Psychology’s publicly available ranking grid as an example. This scoring grid provides a transparent evaluation process that includes elements common to many Canadian programmes. We reviewed literature relevant to predictive validity and racial bias in the grid elements. Our review was guided by two questions: (a) What evidence is there that ranking grid items and other commonly used admissions criteria predict psychology graduate student success? (b) Do the criteria maintain systemic racial bias in the selection of graduate students? We found that all items on the admissions ranking grid were biased, suggesting that racial bias in admissions criteria maintains systemic racism against BIPOC applicants. We propose both concrete and policy/advocacy recommendations to improve access to psychology graduate education for BIPOC groups; these recommendations may benefit other underrepresented groups as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)