Damage Repair at CSUN

College students--especially graduate students--are adults. They are responsible for figuring out what they want out of college or graduate school and what courses they need to take to achieve their goals. They can’t expect anyone to lead them by the hand.

But they can expect good advice, accurate information and clear answers to their questions--all of which appear to have been abysmally lacking in the clinical health psychology program at Cal State Northridge.

And that’s the best-case scenario to explain how a dozen students completed a new, two-year master’s degree program in June only to find that it did not qualify them to take the licensing exam required to get the kind of job they wanted.

CSUN President Jolene Koester, who took office July 1, told The Times, “There are some misunderstandings that have occurred,” a choice of words that expressed more caution than outrage. An internal university review found “ambiguity” in the program literature, according to Mack Johnson, associate vice president for graduate studies, who told The Times, “We are not looking at blame one way or the other.”

Why not? If one student completes two years of course work and internships and finds his degree doesn’t prepare him to do what he’d expected, it may be safe to assume that he just didn’t pay enough attention. That’s the student’s problem. But if a dozen students--the program’s entire inaugural class--find themselves in an identical predicament, it’s the university’s problem.

The worst-case explanation is that students were given information that was plain wrong. Consider a form the students were asked to sign when doing an internship. It stated that “student trainee hours will meet Marriage, Family Therapy Counselor Standards for licensure.” What’s ambiguous about that?

University officials counter that the school’s legal contract with students is its course catalog--and the brand-new clinical health psychology program wasn’t even listed in the catalog for its first two years. Nonetheless, without “blaming” anyone, CSUN offered to waive 75% of the fees for any of the graduates to earn another master’s degree in a two-year program that would qualify them to take the licensing exam. But that hardly makes up for the two years lost, the student loans, the bad faith.

Rather than damage control, Koester should engage in damage repair. Hold someone responsible for this blunder. And find out what kind of advice is being offered elsewhere at the university.