CACREP’s recent memorandum, temporarily suspending the 2024 standards on “underrepresented populations,” attempts to sound procedural and neutral. But behind the careful phrasing is a larger truth our field keeps avoiding: we talk endlessly about diversity, yet we have no coherent definition of who is actually underrepresented.
CACREP never tells us. The memo doesn’t either. And the standards built around it depended on it. When you leave something that important unspecified, programs default to the only demographics they are told to measure. And in counselor education, that list is remarkably short. We track race. We track gender. We ask a basic question about military and disability status. And that’s it.
But here’s the catch: even though CACREP collects data on gender, disability, and military affiliation, they do not ask programs to recruit or retain students or faculty in any of those categories. There are no standards encouraging programs to diversify their gender balance, bring in more second-career veterans, or ensure access for students with disabilities. The only category tied to “underrepresentation” and “continuous and systematic recruitment” has been race.
Everything else, religion, socioeconomic class, ideology, age, worldview, and life stage, remains unmeasured, unaddressed, and untouched by policy. And in our field, what we don’t measure doesn’t count.
To be fair, CACREP’s 2024 Standards Glossary does try to widen the lens. They describe diversity as including age, generational status, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, religion, spirituality, social class, national origin, language, migration status, and veteran status. And they define “underrepresented” as any group that exists in a smaller proportion within a program than in the surrounding community. On paper, that definition is broad, humane, and genuinely inclusive.
But the problem isn’t the words, it’s the implementation. Programs are only required to collect data on race, gender, disability, and military status, and the only category that has ever been tied to recruitment, employment, and retention mandates is race. Everything else CACREP lists, religion, age, worldview, social class, and political identity, remains unmeasured, undocumented, and functionally irrelevant to accreditation. We end up with the appearance of a wide definition and the reality of a narrow and socially constructed one.
The Numbers Don’t Tell the Story We Think They Tell
Let’s start with gender, because the numbers in the CACREP 2022 – 2024 Vital Statistics Reports are stunning. Counseling programs aren’t just majority-female; they are overwhelmingly so:
- Only 17-19% of all counseling students are male.
- Only about 32% of faculty are male.
Women make up roughly four out of every five counseling students nationwide. Men are deeply underrepresented in both enrollment and the faculty pipeline. Yet when was the last time you saw a diversity initiative aimed at recruiting men into counseling?
You haven’t. Because we don’t interpret this as a diversity problem, even though the numerical imbalance is larger than all of the racial gaps we obsess over.
Race: The One Category That Counts
Meanwhile, CACREP data show that counseling programs are racially diverse in ways that many other professions are not:
- White students make up 58% of master’s students
- Black students make up 16%
- Hispanic students make up 11%
- Asian students make up 3%
| Group | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | Trend |
| White | 57.78% | 58.73% | 57.14% | Essentially stable |
| Black | 16.53% | 14.93% | 15.26% | Stable with slight dip in 2023 |
| Hispanic | 11.11% | 11.54% | 11.33% | Slight rise then stable |
| Asian | 2.94% | 3.18% | 3.23% | Very slight upward movement |
| Two or More | 3.40% | 3.29% | 3.47% | Flat |
| Unknown/Other | 6.08% | 5.69% | 7.12% | Increased uncertainty/non-disclosure |
| International | 1.29% | 1.48% | 1.37% | Stable |
This is a fairly balanced racial distribution, one that roughly parallels national population patterns. Counselor education has been doing better than we give it credit for. And yet, race remains the only demographic variable consistently treated as a marker of “underrepresentation.”
If we’re honest, many of the groups we claim to be “fighting to include” are already present, and in some programs, even overrepresented relative to national demographics.
Faculty Demographics show only Modest Shifts
White faculty (2022 → 2023 → 2024)
- 61.89% → 58.90% → 59.42%
(steady with slight fluctuation)
Black faculty
- 16.50% → 17.28% → 16.94%
(very steady)
Hispanic faculty
- 5.80% → 7.17% → 7.33%
(slow increase)
Asian faculty
- 5.56% → 5.72% → 5.94%
(slow increase)
Gender (faculty)
- Male faculty remain around 30–32% in all three years.
- Female faculty remain around 66–68%.
Faculty racial diversity is increasing gradually on its own, without aggressive intervention.
Gender diversity among faculty mirrors student trends: men are underrepresented but receive no attention as an “underrepresented population.”
Underrepresentation Only Counts Where We Look
What about religious minorities? What about worldview diversity? What about the student over 45 returning for a second career? What about political minorities in a field that leans heavily progressive? What about rural students? What about low-income students? None of them show up in the data. Therefore, none of them qualify as “underrepresented.” Therefore, none of them receive recruitment efforts, retention efforts, or protection under the now-suspended standards.
We have unintentionally created a system where underrepresented means only what we choose to measure, and what we choose to measure is only a narrow slice of human identity.
That’s not diversity. That’s selective vision dressed up as principle.
Are We Preventing Discrimination, or Practicing It?
The standard we claim to uphold is nondiscrimination. But is it nondiscrimination when we elevate some demographic boxes and ignore others entirely? If we insist that only certain identities matter, race and (sometimes) sexual orientation, while ignoring underrepresentation in gender, age, faith, disability, ideology, socioeconomic status, rural origin, or life stage… we are not avoiding discrimination. We are practicing it.
And worse, we are socially engineering a profession. We are shaping who becomes a counselor not based on client need, workforce gaps, or the full landscape of human diversity, but based on a very specific cultural lens that limits our definition of who “counts.”
This Isn’t Just a Counseling Problem… It’s a Cultural Pattern
If this tension only existed in our field, it would be one thing. However, the pattern appears everywhere: in media, advertising, university marketing, and even film. We have shifted from representing society to curating it, not documenting demographics, but crafting desired ones.
Advertising Has Been Doing This for Years. Here are just a few examples:
- A 2019 content analysis of 543 television ads found that interracial couples were significantly overrepresented relative to real-life prevalence.
- A 2021 report found 70% of interracial couples in U.S. ads featured a white man and a Black woman, even though this pairing is not the most common interracial pairing in America.
- Multiple commentators have noted the disappearance of Black couples in advertising, replaced with racially ambiguous or mixed-race pairings used to signal “diversity.”
These trends aren’t simply coincidental. They are curated imagery, advertisers telling us what they think the future should look like, not what it actually does.
Film Does It Too, Just Watch One Battle After Another:
In the film One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn both pursue Teyana Taylor, while speculating about whether they are the father of the child. Nothing wrong with any racial unions, but the casting choices, relational dynamics, and pairing patterns echo the broader trend: Representation has shifted from descriptive to prescriptive.
The same is happening in other films where certain romantic pairings or family structures are spotlighted not because they reflect demographic reality, but because they check particular boxes.
Higher Education Mirrors the Same Pattern
Universities curate their image too:
- Brochures often depict highly diverse student bodies, which can be unrecognizable from the actual demographics on campus.
- Counseling programs often showcase very young students “treating” much older adults, a scenario that almost never occurs in actual practice.
- Faculty webpages highlight representation in some areas while quietly avoiding others, such as ideology or religion.
- Diversity statements amplify particular identities while omitting equally meaningful ones.
These aren’t accurate representations. They are at best, aspirational constructions.
And counselor education, through accreditation pressures, can unintentionally participate in this curation.
When Data Collection Becomes Intrusion
There’s another layer we need to discuss: privacy, autonomy, and ethics.
Colleges should be allowed to reflect their identities, grounded in their histories, missions, and communities. Federal law already recognizes this in allowing religious institutions exemptions from certain nondiscrimination requirements. They can prefer students or employees who share their beliefs.
I’m not arguing that we discriminate. In fact, the opposite. But when we start socially engineering specific demographic outcomes, we often end up violating the very principles we teach.
Do we have the right to demand identity disclosures?
- Do we really need to know every ethnicity a student identifies with?
- Do we need to collect sexual orientation?
- Do we force LGBTQ+ students to “come out” in the name of diversity?
- Do we require people to label themselves in ways they may not be ready for, or may not feel safe disclosing?
In today’s political climate, disclosing sexual orientation or gender identity can put some students at risk. Yet diversity dashboards, accreditation reports, and demographic surveys quietly pressure students to identify themselves for institutional benefit.
This violates core counseling values:
- autonomy
- informed consent
- self-determination
- safety
- cultural humility
It also violates federal protections around sensitive data. Disability status is protected under the ADA. Medical and mental-health information cannot be required. Sexual orientation and gender identity fall under sensitive personal data categories in privacy law. Yet in counselor education, because we prize self-reflection and personal growth, we sometimes behave as if we are exempt. We are not. Students are not our clients, and we are not entitled to their private identities. Identity data should always be voluntary, not coerced, required, or implied. Once we force identity disclosure, we cease to honor our students’ humanity. We are using their humanity to satisfy institutional metrics.
The Age Gap No One Talks About
One of the greatest differences I’ve seen across programs isn’t race at all. It’s age.
- Most state universities enroll counseling students in their twenties, fresh out of psychology bachelor’s degrees, with early life experience.
- Private and online programs, including the ones I’ve built, enroll older adults, often second-career professionals with average ages in their forties.
Who is underrepresented? It depends entirely on where you look. And because CACREP doesn’t measure age, the profession ignores one of the largest and most meaningful diversity variables in counselor identity. Clients are diverse in age. Their counselors should be, too.
We Cannot Build a Profession on Half the Picture
The memo suspending these standards acknowledges the confusion around DEI and the conflicts between federal, state, and institutional policies. But the truth is simpler:
You cannot enforce a standard you refuse to define. And you cannot foster diversity if you only see the demographics that show up on a form.
Counseling is supposed to be a profession rooted in human complexity, identity, culture, worldview, resilience, and context. Yet our accreditation process has reduced diversity to a couple of checkboxes and treated all other forms of human difference as noise.
If we want true diversity… real diversity, meaningful diversity, we need to start measuring the full spectrum of who our students are. Not just the categories that fit an ideological narrative. Not just the safe ones. Not just the ones we know how to tally or show us as an ally.
The memo is a pause button. It gives us a chance to rethink, not retreat. Perhaps this is the moment for counselor education to foster a broader, more honest, and more human understanding of diversity and underrepresentation. One that values more than the narrow set of categories we’ve been trained to count.
One that reflects the clients we serve, not the politics we fear.
Sources Referenced:
CACREP Memorandum to Accredited Programs, September 16, 2025
CACREP Vital Statistics Report 2022.
CACREP Vital Statistics Report 2023
CACREP Vital Statistics Report 2024
Bhat, S., Myers, S., & Royne, M. (2018). Interracial Couples in Ads: Do Consumers’ Gender and Racial Differences Affect Their Reactions? Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 39(2), 160–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2018.1428249
Larson, M. S. (2002). Race and interracial relationships in children’s television commercials. Journal of Advertising Research, 51, 404–416.
Mai, E. (Shirley), Haytko, D. L., & Taillon, B. J. (2022). How Advertisements Mixing Black and White Actors Affect Consumer Intent: Perceived Authenticity Can Strengthen Responses To Interracial Advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 62(3), 252–270. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-2022-013
Mai, E. (Shirley), Haytko, D. L., & Taillon, B. J. (2022). How Advertisements Mixing Black and White Actors Affect Consumer Intent: Perceived Authenticity Can Strengthen Responses To Interracial Advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 62(3), 252–270. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-2022-013