Students Misled About Degree, Ex-Official Says
The former head of Cal State Northridge’s psychology department acknowledged Tuesday that his staff led a dozen graduate students to mistakenly think they were being trained to become licensed clinical health counselors.
Former department Chairman Tyler Blake said the university owes a debt to the inaugural graduates of the clinical health psychology program, created in 1998.
“To me it’s beyond ambiguous,” Blake said. “It’s misleading.”
A few of the dozen graduates prepared Tuesday to ask the school to pardon their student loans because professors encouraged them to complete two years of study under false assumptions.
Five of the 12 graduates met Tuesday to file formal grievances asking the university to investigate alleged malfeasance by the professor who created the clinical health psychology program.
Cal State Northridge administrators acknowledged Monday their program description in a brochure was ambiguous. The students learned six months before their June graduation that they couldn’t sit for the exam.
The university has offered to waive as much as 75% of the fees for graduates who transferred to another master’s degree program for two years.
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