In Dreams Begin Responsibility: Why and How to Measure the Quality of Graduate Training in Applied Behavior Analysis.

Critchfield (2015) wrote a position paper. The paper says graduate ABA programs should track how well their alumni do in real jobs.

Programs should publish those results. This lets the field see which schools produce the most effective BCBAs.

The paper did not collect new data. It argued that consumer trust drops when poorly trained BCBAs hit the field.

Tracking alumni success is the only way to prove a program is worth tuition dollars.

Najdowski et al. (2021), Levy et al. (2022), and Mathur et al. (2022) all extend the idea. They say programs should also be judged on antiracist and cultural-responsiveness training.

Critchfield (2018) adds another layer. Programs should show that alumni can use stimulus-relations to teach faster.

Britton et al. (2021) push for ethical-behavior metrics. McComas et al. (2025) want anti-ableism scores. Jackson-Perry et al. (2025) say critical autism studies should count too.

Together these papers turn one metric into a dashboard. Field success is still the core, but now it includes equity, ethics, and emergent-learning skill.

If you hire BCBAs or sit on a hiring panel, ask for alumni outcome data. Programs that share it are betting on quality. If you teach, start tracking your own graduates’ client gains and publish them. One page of numbers per cohort is enough. It protects the field and gives future students a reason to choose your course.