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In planning for this blog, I asked my students what questions they had about the psychology-related education and career path. A couple themes stood out:
- Where will psychology-related graduate degrees take them? They asked a lot of questions about graduate degrees that centered mostly around (high) salaries and career success.
- Is the discipline credible? Students made several comments about people telling them it’s easy and doesn’t have a lot of worth.
Around the time I asked students for their questions, Psychology Club at my college asked me to speak about my educational and career path. I told them no because I don’t think it’s ethical to suggest to students that they will be able to support themselves by doing what I did. In fact, when advising students, I usually try to steer them away from the path I took.
I grew up hearing, “Get a master’s degree, and you’re set for life.” I have two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and almost 20 years of experience in the social sector. As much as I don’t want to admit it, and as much as people don’t want to hear this, I am in no way set for life.
I live in a tiny rental in a neighborhood filled with million-dollar condos and mini-mansions. My party-planner and house-flipper neighbors make vastly more than I did when I was working 1.6 full-time with an MSW from the number one school of social work in the country. I absolutely value my education for its own sake and enthusiastically share that with my students, but I’m doing them no favors by letting them think they’ll move into one of those mini-mansions, or even a have an apartment without a roommate, just as soon as they get a psychology-related graduate degree.
Here’s the thing: I knew what I was getting into, to an extent. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with colleagues to the tune of, “We love learning! We definitely didn’t do this for money.” I don’t think, however, I fully realized the consequences of accepting a low earning potential. But I, at least, had some idea.
While I of course encourage definitions of success that are not linked to income, the fact is, almost all of my students need to make a living. Those of us who teach psychology are pretty clear that an associate’s or bachelor’s degree is typically a starting point, but students still think, “Okay, so master’s degree = financial self-sufficiency.” It’s irresponsible to facilitate such beliefs.
My first lesson in these realities was as a sophomore in psychology at the University of Illinois. One of my community psychology professors invited his wife, a practicing MSW, to talk to the class. That’s the first time someone actually gave me numbers to go along with an expected salary. Even for idealistic me, the student who was going to do the work for its own sake and not money, it was shocking. To this day, I wish I had thought about how she most definitely relied on her husband’s salary to meet her basic needs.
The second lesson came in my first personnel management class in my MSW program. One day, my professor simply went off about how we should stop accepting such low salaries and feeling grateful when we get health insurance. That message told me more about what I’d be looking forward to career-wise, but again, I was still too idealistic to really pay attention. I wish I had. If I had looked around at my MSW mentors, I would have seen that most of them relied on their partners to pay the mortgage.
When I worked for a large institution in San Diego, a county-wide salary study came out showing that, on average, residents with bachelor’s degrees made significantly more than those with master’s and doctorate degrees. I valued my education for what I learned and how it shaped my life and work, and those numbers could use a deep level of analysis, but it was upsetting to think, at least when it comes to earning potential, that it might have actually hurt me.
The other day, while talking to a government epidemiologist, I mentioned I have an MSW and she replied, “I’m so, so sorry. The only people here who make less than the MSWs are the administrative assistants. Actually, they might make more.”
Listen, some people with psychology and related graduate degrees do really well when it comes to income, but no degree program can or should promise that. In my opinion, they shouldn’t even promise financial self-sufficiency. Let’s be honest. Those who do really well are often men who are put into management quickly (the glass escalator effect), private practitioners who are excellent business people, academics who distinguish themselves through their research, those who snagged a great internship (though I had two great internships), and the like.
Early on, students should critically assess where they want to be and how to get there, including considerations like basic needs, desired housing, family goals, and other real-life concerns. As much as it may hurt to admit, simply possessing a psychology-related graduate degree (or two) may not be the answer. Obviously, I value those degrees tremendously, but I’m not here to make false promises.
My top advice to students, especially those who need to support themselves and their families, is to talk to people who have lived and worked with the degrees they are exploring. Schools have a vested interest in you pursuing degrees and depending on your professors' backgrounds, they honestly might not know, or believe, the reality.
Absolutely, everyone doing this work deserves financial self-sufficiency and the positions many of us fill should, certainly, be better funded and pay more. The reality, however, is that even psychological graduate education cannot guarantee the standard of living that most students expect and that we all deserve, especially in today’s economy. To allow and promote unrealistic expectations does an enormous disservice to the field, to the integrity of the degrees, and to the people giving their time and energy to this valuable work.
Maybe that’s where the credibility questions come from.
I don’t want my students to plan a trip, spend all their time and gas money getting there, and then crash into a roadblock no one warned them about. Uncovering hidden truths might scare them, but I’d rather expose the potholes upfront so they can chart a clearer, and safer, path.
