The Internship Supply as a Common-Pool Resource: A Pathway to Managing the Imbalance Problem

The shortfall in internship positions available through the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers' matching process has left doctoral students in professional psychology in a painful bind: take an internship outside the match, or fail to graduate. The quality of education suffers, as does the quality of the profession as a whole. This crisis has worsened as the years go by, and no effective remedy has been found. A widely celebrated literature on the management of scarce but renewable resources has developed over the past 25 years, and it offers a path toward understanding and solving this problem. This literature points to the need, and helps conceptualize the methods, for the educational community in professional psychology to take greater responsibility for the quality of the internship in particular, and for the quality of our graduates' education and competence more generally.