Counselor education program faculties evaluate applicants to masters and doctoral level programs using criteria that the faculties hope will predict the applicant's potential for academic success and then effectiveness as a counselor, counselor educator, or researcher. Choosing admission criteria to assess this level of potential in an applicant is quite a task. Those counselor education programs that are accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) have the benefit of the admission guidelines provided by CACREP standards for accreditation. These guidelines give only basic, general direction to programs regarding their admission criteria but each individual program determines their own criteria for admission. The purpose of this study was to discover any recognizable trends in admission policy criteria, in terms of specific criteria used to evaluate and select students from the applicant pool, for CACREP accredited masters and doctoral programs. This study also sought to discover any recognizable trends in admission policy criteria, in terms of a specific number of criteria used to evaluate and select students for CACREP accredited master and doctoral counselor education programs. This qualitative study investigated 178 masters level CACREP accredited counselor education programs and 45 doctoral CACREP accredited counselor education programs. The CACREP Website provided contact names and Web address for each program. Admission criteria were pulled from the program Websites. If no criteria were present on the Website, the program contact person was contacted by phone or by email. A contact form for the masters level programs, and another for the doctoral level programs, was developed to record program criteria. A rate or return of 96% for the masters level programs and 91% for the doctoral programs was achieved. For the purposes of this study, a trend was defined as 1) any measure being required by 50% or more of the responding programs, or 2) the number of measures used by a program being equal to the mean number of measures used by all programs. The masters level program trends were for counselor education programs to use the following criteria to assess applicants: transcripts, grade point average (GPA), letters of reference, applications, Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores, letters of intent, and interviews with faculty members. A trend was also discovered for masters level programs to use between 3 and 12 measures to assess applicants for admission with a mean score of 7.01, a median score of 7, and a mode of 7. The doctoral level program trends were for counselor education programs to use the following criteria to assess applicants: transcripts, letters of reference, letters of intent to address goals, aspirations, experiences, and purpose, GRE scores, applications, and GPA. A trend was also discovered for doctoral level programs to use between 4 and 10 measures to assess applicants for admission with a mean score of 8.097, a median score of 8, and a mode of 9. Given the high rate of return, the trends discovered can be said to reflect the admission criteria used to assess applicants for admission into CACREP accredited masters and doctoral counselor education programs in the United States. A limitation could be that the data was collected using different methods of communication in that some data was collected from Websites, some from email correspondence, and some data from phone conversations. It seemed that the Websites and the emails gave the admission criteria but the phone conversations gave an understanding of not only the criteria used but the process used in selecting students from the applicant pool.
