In recent days, psychology professors turned their attention to a special course, offered at a handful of universities, that is designed to orient undergraduates to graduate school admission and academic life. "What they are getting is a peek behind the curtain into the professional culture of psychology," argued Ehrenfels, who secretly monitored the discussion. The social psychologist has been informing students of the risks associated with committing to Psychology as a major program of study and career path. The author's suspicions were confirmed when professors noted student reaction to the course. "I am particularly interested in the reality check aspects of the course," reported an unidentified listserv contributor, citing a student. Judging from the discussion, Ehrenfels believes the course diminished some students' commitment to the major, causing them to take a few steps back. "I interpret this as a product of informed choice and view it as positive," claimed one listserv contributor.

Ehrenfels scoffed at the positive outlook. "These poor students, many of them seniors, have just learned that the profession is not what they thought. I can only imagine the furrowed brows of these students in class, betraying the thought 'what the hell is this?' and thinking they've just been debriefed after a deceptive experiment. The professors participating in the listserv discussion reported that students feel they lacked both the interest and the skills required to achieve graduate admission or master frivolous aspects of the epistemology like writing APA style and publishing empirical research as a graduate student to be competitive for tenure-track positions. And the professors interpret this as a positive for the student rather than as a negative for the field. And not everything is rosy and right for the many students who have been misled into thinking their BA qualifies and prepares them for jobs. While there are jobs to which these students can apply, they are by no stretch of the imagination the only graduates invited to apply. The jobs listed as available to psych majors are hardly psychologistic and are non-specific, meaning that while there are jobs out there to which only biology or marketing majors can apply, there are no jobs for which only psychology majors can apply. If the students received all this information, including but not limited to the requirements and rate of failure associated with admission to graduate school, procurement of the doctorate, and appointment to faculty, there would be this massive exodus from the psychology major. The recall of psychology majors would be nearly as total as that for American made automobiles in the 1980s."

Ehrenfels sees only one way out of the current predicament. "The course alone solves nothing. The absence of the course solves nothing. You need at this point to supplement the course with substantive reforms to psychology education so it is less dry, less dull, and less redundant. Currently, they are providing a watered down version of graduate school training that fails to address the human psyche. Some programs have attempted to solve this problem by making the undergraduate experience more rigorous, more like graduate school, so its students have a competitive edge, but I have never seen a program able to pull this off without further stripping the curriculum of both its psychologistic substance and its value for post-baccaleureate employment. The students are indoctrinated into the scientific paradigm, presenting their cookie-cutter 2x2 ANOVAs at poster sessions for regional conventions of the APA, all the while being taught to dismiss (without so much as an adequate second-hand review) the theories of Freud and Jung as culture-bound charlatan chauvinists ."