Identifying Educational Pathways to Graduate-Level Behavioral Health Professions: A Latent Class Analysis

To address the behavioral health workforce crisis occurring in the United States, supporting students' interest in the behavioral health professions is urgent. Ongoing exploration of possible educational pathways into the behavioral health workforce is warranted, which can highlight opportunities to expand the number of adequately trained, culturally and linguistically representative, behavioral health providers. The purposes of the current study are to identify distinct educational pathways into graduate-level behavioral health professions and assess the extent to which varying pathways are associated with individual sociodemographic and employment characteristics. Leveraging an analytic sample of 1858 individuals from the 2021 National Survey of College Graduates (representative of a subpopulation of 847,095 individuals) who possessed a graduate degree and indicated being employed full time in a principal job related to behavioral health, latent class analysis is employed to identify distinct patterns with respect to the attainment of an associate degree, undergraduate field of study, and graduate field of study. Results favor a four-class solution featuring the following four general patterns: social work, psychology foundation and non-social work graduate degree, non-social work foundation and social work graduate degree, and non-psychology foundation and non-social work graduate degree. The educational pathways possess notable similarities in terms of gender identity, average salary, and job satisfaction; but also demonstrate important differences that could shape efforts to develop new programs and extend investments to support behavioral health workforce professional trajectories, with particular emphasis placed on financial support for educational pathways that efficiently increase the diversity of the graduate-level behavioral health workforce.