The New Classroom

By Lisa R. Rhodes

January 2025

Patrick Franzen was already retired when he decided to pursue a career in counseling. After 25 years working in information technology for the U.S. Army, he was ready to switch his focus away from electronics and toward helping his community. As he considered master’s programs, he found himself gravitating toward online options. Not only would that allow him to attend school from his rural Kansas home, but he knew that such programs tended to attract non-traditional students like him — those in rural areas, retirees or those with prior military experience. He selected Upper Iowa University’s online master of science program in counseling.

“As a disabled veteran, it gave me a little more confidence that I can relate to XYZ,” says Franzen, who is finishing his final year of the program. “We’re so diverse and with different worldviews because we’re geographically dispersed, but yet we can all come together and share all our experiences.”

Online education is one way counseling is becoming more accessible for students like Franzen, who come from diverse backgrounds and seek to practice in underserved areas. Times are changing and so is counseling. As counseling education evolves to develop students into professional counselors ready to serve the clients of tomorrow, what are the best paths forward? There are several opportunities the profession can embrace to ensure counseling remains a viable career option in the years ahead.

Learning Today and Tomorrow

One way to better prepare counseling students for the future is for the profession to consider moving from a competence-based model to a lifelong learning model or continuous learning model.

Margaret Lamar, PhD, LPC, LPCC, associate department chair of the counselor education and supervision PhD program at Palo Alto University in California, says in this higher education model, the profession would focus on teaching students how to continue their own learning as they grow as counselors.

“That’s really the way that we move and grow as a profession. Counseling programs should cultivate a growth mindset where learning doesn’t stop after graduation,” Lamar says. “By normalizing growth, failure and reflection, counselors will naturally seek ways to deepen their understanding of their clients and themselves over time.”

Although the lifelong learning model has been derived from various educational, philosophical and psychological traditions, Lamar says, there are three ways it can be used to create a new career pathway for counselors:

Integrate reflective practice into training. Counselor education programs should incorporate regular reflective practice exercises into coursework and fieldwork. This involves encouraging students to assess their personal biases, values and areas for improvement through journaling, supervision and peer feedback, Lamar says.

“Reflection develops self-awareness and promotes a growth mindset, helping counselors recognize their limitations and seek new knowledge throughout their careers. It reinforces the idea that learning is ongoing,” she says.

Establish a structured continuing education (CE) requirement. Creating robust and flexible CE systems that emphasize new developments in mental health, counseling techniques and social issues is critical, Lamar says. These systems could include mandatory CE courses, workshops and certifications that focus on emerging topics such as trauma-informed care, cultural humility or technological advances.

Advocate for institutional support. Buy-in from universities, licensure boards and professional organizations like ACA is a necessity to prioritize lifelong learning by embedding it into licensure renewal requirements. It would also provide accessible resources for continuous education, such as career-long supervision, that would extend beyond the early licensure years.

“This would give seasoned professionals the opportunity to discuss difficult cases and receive feedback throughout their career,” Lamar says.

The Benefits of Baccalaureate Education

An idea that is gaining traction is establishing an undergraduate degree in counseling. Lamar suggests that to get there, the profession could follow the social work model, allowing students to earn a bachelor’s degree in counseling and become certified — not licensed — to work in the field for a salary, rather than waiting four to five years to complete their education and gain licensure.

“Students can work doing intakes or risk assessments, for example,” Lamar says. Students could then move into a master’s-level counseling program to focus more on advanced skills and learn where they could apply that content. While students are working in a counseling setting and pursuing a master’s degree, they could also receive a salary while working to complete their practicum and internship hours, she says.

Currently, many master’s-level counseling students must leave their full-time job or work part time so they can volunteer in clinical settings to earn internship or practicum hours. Continuing to ask students to forsake a salary for up to eight years to earn a counseling credential makes the profession less attractive, Lamar says.

“This means that you’re limiting the number of people who can enter your master’s level program,” she says. “You’re limiting it to people who have financial and other sorts of resources — to have someone watch their children, for example. I think the financial piece is a huge barrier to people.”

Instituting a bachelor’s degree is a smart move, says Letitia Browne-James, PhD, LMHC-S, associate professor and program coordinator of the master of arts counseling, marriage, couples and family counseling program at Adler Graduate School in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

“I think a bachelor’s in counseling could be helpful not only to give people the opportunity to work in the field before obtaining a master’s and, ultimately, licensure in counseling, it could also allow for restructuring master’s programs to focus on more advanced counseling skills,” Browne-James says.

In an undergraduate course, for example, counselor educators could teach the fundamental topics that are discussed in courses such as Introduction to Counseling: what counseling is, the history of the profession, and an introduction to ethics and multicultural counseling, she says. They could also touch upon topics that students constantly ask for more instruction on, such as multicultural skills, trauma-informed care, diagnosis and treatment planning, documentation training and other applicable skills.

In the master’s program, Browne-James says counselor educators could offer a refresher and deeper content, while maximizing that time to focus on the other topics they don’t often have adequate time to cover now. These include the business side of counseling such as how to start a private practice, bill insurance and develop the advocacy skills for the profession, community and clients.

Finally, offering a bachelor’s in counseling may help instill counselor identity by forgoing the requirement that students earn a degree in a counseling-related field like psychology before moving onto a higher-level counseling degree, she says.

Kelli McFarland, LPC, a doctoral student in the counseling education and supervision program at the University of New Orleans, says she is investing about 10 years to pursue a counseling education.

“I would be interested in how an undergraduate degree in counseling would work. Maybe like a three-two program or dual enrollment for specific classes. I think it would be an easier sell to potential students if it was advertised in that way,” she says.

"I would have been interested in an undergraduate degree in counseling if that was offered. It would have sped up my timeline of completing school,” says McFarland, who earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health in an accelerated graduate program at the Louisiana State University Health Science Center in 2020.

Embracing Non-Western Perspectives

While a lifelong learning model and a counseling undergraduate degree may help draw potential students to the field, the decolonization of counseling’s curriculum is long overdue, counselors say.

Retired counselor educator Cirecie A. West-Olatunji, PhD, is an ACA Fellow and a former president of ACA and the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development. She says it is time for the profession to be “more sophisticated in the ways in which we talk about diverse people.”

Introducing counseling students to only Eurocentric theories is problematic, West-Olatunji says, because many master-level students, during their practicum and internship, work with clients who are from minoritized communities.

“These communities often embrace worldviews that are not covered in counseling theories, courses or textbooks,” West-Olatunji says. “We need to really transform. We need to have people who are writing 21st century theory books and counseling books that are more equitable. … As long as male, Euro-American counselor educators dominate the profession, we will struggle to include counseling theories from non-Western perspectives.”

Research and Community Engagement

Producing relevant research is a skill that must also be emphasized in counseling education to keep the field alive.

Browne-James says if the profession eventually develops a bachelor’s degree program, students could be introduced to seeking out quality, ethical and well-executed research studies during their undergraduate years, rather than focusing so much on it in their master’s program. Students could also become acquainted with the importance of conducting and using community samples in research and producing data that are accessible to the public.

“We’re missing a lot of valuable data by not collecting data from community members or mostly from academic or professional samples,” she says. “Spaces like social media, blogs, podcasts, magazines and other outlets could be great spaces to recruit and disseminate research where the general public can access it easily instead of having to pay for a journal or having access to a database to get it.”

Lamar says the profession needs more full-time counselors to engage in research, whether they’re doing it on their own or partnering with other colleagues. She says her students are encouraged to collaborate with faculty who do research full time so they can produce evidence-based and community-based data that better meet the demands of academic reviews and publication.

The field must endorse research that is connected to counselors who work in the field and to the lives of the people who are being studied, West-Olatunji says. “We need to get faculty out of their offices to partner with practitioners who are engaged in the research because these practitioners are connected to the real world.”

These partnerships are likely to produce more truthful research that will provide the outcomes practitioners in community mental health agencies and other counseling settings really need, West-Olatunji says.

Derrick Shepard, PhD, LPC, an assistant professor of counseling at the University of Tennessee at Martin, says there is a lot of room for growth for the counseling profession when it comes to research. “As a profession, research informs practice,” he says. “Other helping professions have done a great job defining their disciplines, setting a research agenda, while aligning educational standards and licensure requirements around those definitions.”

The Intention to Diversify

The longstanding lack of diversity in race and gender in counseling must be addressed or the field may become derelict in its ability to properly serve future clients, these counselors say.

Making counseling more diverse and inclusive is “not going to happen because it should,” West-Olatunji says. “It’s going to happen because we intentionally put the effort into it.”

Diversity recruitment programs have been successful for other organizations and professions. Lamar and Browne-James credit the National Board for Certified Counselors’ Minority Fellowship Program for opening counseling to students of color while West-Olatunji points to the Call Me MiSTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models) initiative, administered by Clemson University in South Carolina, for making the field of education more accessible to men of color.

Shepard recommends studying how nursing, which was once considered a field that was only open to women, has made male nursing a highly visible career option. 

In 2018, when McFarland was completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Dillard University, a private historically Black university in New Orleans, she met Kimberly Frazier, PhD, a former ACA president, at a career recruitment day at the university. Frazier, then an associate professor of clinical rehabilitation and counseling at Louisiana State University Health New Orleans, encouraged McFarland to enter the field. Meeting Frazier, an experienced counselor educator and a Black woman like McFarland, was pivotal for the trajectory of her career, McFarland says.

“Before attending the fair, I had no idea what my post-graduate plans were,” she says. “After discussing my options with her, she opened my eyes to the possibilities that counseling had to offer.”

Though we can’t predict the future of the profession, it’s clear that the current state of how we attract and train counselors will need to change. It will take skill, determination, flexibility and cooperation — between counselors, ACA, students and other stakeholders — to adapt and thrive.

Freelance writer Isobel Whitcomb contributed to this article.