Can You Afford to Go to Graduate School?

Spring is here — the season when thousands of would-be clinical psychology graduate students get the bad news that they will have to put off their dreams until the next "round" of applications. There are far more people who want to train for doctorates in clinical psychology than there are available positions. A recent report by the American Psychological Association said that the acceptance rate is only 12 percent.

Many disappointed applicants have responded to the pressure by working hard to make their applications as competitive as possible. They might pay high tuition to earn a master's in psychology, in order to get more research experience and better letters of recommendation and to "prove" that they can do graduate-level work. They might work for a year or more as a Research Assistant in a university-based psychology laboratory, again hoping that the experience will somehow improve their chances.

With such long odds, seeking admission to highly selective programs must feel like going into a boxing ring and being pummeled over and over. The good news is that there are doctoral programs in clinical psychology that are less selective. Most of these offer the more clinically oriented Psy.D. degree, and not the Ph.D. degree. In short, Psy.D.s are seeking to work with patients on a daily basis, whereas the original intent of the Ph.D. was for those clinical psychologists to conduct research and to teach. In reality, a substantial number of Ph.D. clinical psychologists end up doing mostly clinical work (i.e., treating patients). The Ph.D. programs produce far more graduates than there are available faculty or "pure research" positions. It is one of the many ironies of our profession that many graduate trainees end up spending years learning how to be clinical researchers just like their advisors, only to spend most of their careers providing direct clinical services.

I have heard repeatedly from psychology faculty around the United States that they do not recommend Psy.D. programs to their students because they feel that the degrees are "not worth it." A different APA report estimated that the average student loan debt for a Psy.D. student is a whopping $200,000. But there is a big difference between whether something costs a lot of money and whether something is "worth it." I would hate for people to deny themselves the opportunity of serving as a clinical psychologist simply because some professor told them that getting into a ridiculously competitive, "fully funded" Ph.D. program is the only fiscally viable option.

First, let's explore briefly what is meant by a "funded" Ph.D. program. Usually, this means that your tuition is hugely subsidized, or offset, by the money coming in from research grants your advisor is actively working on. (The average Ph.D. student graduates with "only" $75,000 in debt, versus the Psy.D.'s $200,000.) By the time you are a more advanced doctoral student, you will be writing the grant proposals that will hopefully fund the students who come after you. Of course, nothing is "free" in this world. You will be doing plenty of work to support your advisor's research program and your discounted tuition is your sole compensation. The thousands of hours of collecting data, analyzing data, writing journal articles, preparing conference presentations, writing grant proposals, etc. all come at a price — which is time you could have been spending developing your clinical skills and experience. And remember that while you may want a job just like your faculty advisor's, that doesn't mean that there will be any available when you graduate.

The other consideration is the largely unseen cost of getting into a Ph.D. program, such as the aforementioned highly expensive master's degrees earned to burnish an application, and the often low-paying year or two spent as a Research Assistant during what many are now calling the "post-bac" period. (As in post-bachelors, as in, I didn't get into a clinical psych program during my first round of applications and now I'm trying to rectify that.) And then there's the cost of the applications themselves (I've seen reports of candidates spending over $1,000 per round on application fees alone). So, if you spent one year as an RA and two as a master's student, over the course of three application rounds, you have to consider not only the $3,000 in application fees, but also the master's program tuition and the three years of lost earnings because of the delay in becoming a clinical psychologist. If your starting pay as a clinical psychologist is $70,000, then those three years you spent prior to getting into that Ph.D. program cost you $210,000 (minus whatever you earned as an RA), plus the master's program tuition and the application fees.

Now what about that $200,000 in student loan debt? How could anyone pay that off? Let's say you get a terrible interest rate (5 percent) and a 20-year payoff period. That would make your monthly payment $1,320. (If you got a better rate and a longer payoff, that amount would go down.) At this point, most people panic: "I'll never be able to buy a house! I'll never be able to have children! I'll be driving my high school car forever!" I suspect that the panic arises because most people see these payments as costs, and not as business expenses. Most people don't see themselves as being in business, but doing so could provoke a very important change in perspective. Once you start thinking of student loan debts as business investments, whether or not they are affordable (or prudent business decisions) comes more clearly into focus.

I will make my pitch for becoming an Enterprising Psychologist in my next post.