The changing methods and attitudes of admissions committees are examined, tracing their trends to developments in theory (ego psychology) and practice (a broadened range of clinical application) and to extraneous factors, such as the size of the pool of applicants, which is in turn primarily based on the relative acceptance of psychoanalysis by medicine and psychiatry. The paper highlights the inherent difficulties of selection research and it examines the implications for psychoanalytic training of the changing approaches to selection.