A decade ago, Ben Campbell, PhD, gave up a stable and lucrative information technology career to go to graduate school in psychology because he wanted to do work that made a difference in people's lives. Today Campbell, 40, has the career he imagined. He is a licensed clinical psychologist who works with children and families at a Kaiser Permanente office in the San Francisco Bay area.
But his rewarding career has come at a great cost — almost $200,000 in educational debt.
To those who haven't been paying attention to the rising cost of graduate psychology education, that number might seem startling. But a recent survey of student and early career members of APA found that the median anticipated final graduate debt load for current students — excluding undergraduate debt — is $110,000.
For students in health service provider fields, it's $120,000. For those in research and other fields, it's $72,500. For those pursuing a PsyD, it's $160,000.
Among early career psychologists — those who graduated in the last 10 years — the median total debt was $80,000. Those in health service provider fields averaged $95,000 in debt, those in research and other fields averaged $58,000, and those with a PsyD owed $138,500.
The study, published in February in Training and Education in Professional Psychology (TEPP), marks the first time that APA has taken a comprehensive look at graduate student debt since 2009. It was conducted by committee members and staff of the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS), with input from APA's Center for Workforce Studies.
"We had heard from a lot of students who felt buried in debt, and we wanted to have a better sense of what the data really were," says Eddy Ameen, PhD, APAGS assistant director and a study co-author. He says that though he expected to see an increase in debt since 2009, even he found the new numbers surprising. "I didn't expect to see it happen so steeply," he says.
A larger trend
Psychology graduate students are not alone in their plight — rising debt for graduate education is an issue in many fields. Student debt in the United States surpassed $1 trillion in 2011, and a large portion of that debt is the result of graduate and professional degrees.
About 40 percent of recent federal student loans have gone to students pursuing graduate and professional degrees, according to a 2014 New America Foundation analysis of U.S. Department of Education data. That analysis found sharp increases in graduate student debt from 2004 to 2012 across almost all fields, including law, medicine, education, arts, social work and many more.
"The whole student debt conversation in this country goes on as though we were just talking about undergrads," says economist Sandy Baum, PhD, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies graduate education financing. "But the reality is that a huge portion of the increase in debt is from graduate students."
One recent change has made that debt even more expensive to repay. In 2011, Congress ended subsidized federal loans for graduate students, meaning that unlike undergraduate loans, graduate loans accrue interest even while the borrower is in school.
For students, Baum says, the key question is return on investment.
"It's fine to borrow $300,000 if you're going to earn $250,000 a year," she says. "But many people won't. Everybody who goes to law school thinks they're going to make that much money, and it's not realistic."
In this regard, psychology students face particularly tough circumstances. The median first-year salary of the early-career professionals surveyed in the new study was $60,000 — making repaying their debt even more daunting than for graduates in higher-paying professions.
Median debt loads for current graduate students and early career psychologists, 2014
A stressor for students…
For Campbell, living with educational debt is a huge stressor, he says. "I think it even affects my mental health. I feel like I have a very great weight on my back. It comes into every financial decision I make. I was married last year, and so now my debt has become our debt. Buying a home, saving for retirement — I'm hobbled from doing all of those things my peers are doing."
Again, Campbell is far from alone. In the TEPP study, the researchers asked respondents about major life milestones they felt they had to delay because of their education debt. Nearly two-thirds of current students reported delaying saving for retirement and buying a home; half reported they put off having children. Among early career psychologists, 56 percent reported delaying retirement planning, 42 percent waited to buy a home and 32 percent had delayed having children.
Those numbers are striking, but the personal stories behind them are even more so, says Jennifer Doran, the lead author of the report. Doran, a graduate student in clinical psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York and the 2013–14 APAGS chair, coded the responses for a forthcoming qualitative paper also based on the survey.
"People talked about their experiences and what they wish they had known," she says. "It was heart-wrenching."
In addition to the personal toll, debt can also limit students' and early career psychologists' professional options. Take Yolanda Perkins-Volk, 36, a fourth-year student pursuing a PsyD at the Minnesota School of Professional Psychology in Minneapolis, who is studying for a career in geropsychology. By the time she graduates, she will have accumulated about $170,000 in debt.
Because of that, she says, she is focusing her career goals very tightly on finding a full-time job with the federal government, ideally in the Department of Veterans Affairs system. Perkins-Volk has been a federal employee for 12 years — she spent four years as an active-duty soldier before entering graduate school, and more recently has juggled her student schedule with part-time work in a local office of the IRS, as well as raising her two children.
"I mainly did [the part-time work] for the health insurance," she says. "My program isn't funded, and I have to find a way to support my family."
Now, she says, because she must pay off her debt and support her family, opening a private practice or pursuing an academic career are not options for her: "I need to be able to look at a pay chart and know what I'll make now, and in the future," she says.
Despite the costs, Perkins-Volk says she doesn't regret choosing the graduate program that she did. She needed to stay in Minnesota for her education, and she values the clinical training and experience she's gained at her school.
"It was the best option for me," she says. "What I've learned is worth that $170,000."
Brittan Davis, a graduate student in counseling psychology at Cleveland State University, feels the same way. Though she has some anxiety about her $200,000 in graduate debt, she says, "I do feel very optimistic. My strong identity is as a social justice advocate, and I love to support people through difficult times in their lives. I feel fortunate that I've found a professional home that fits and that gives me joy and hope for the future."
…and a problem for the field
But others feel differently. Among the survey responses that Doran and the other researchers received are many quotes like this one:
"My debt is absolutely shattering the dreams I had for myself. … It fills me with anxiety, depression and resentment, which detract from my career satisfaction. I really regret my career choice, which is completely tragic and sad for me, as it was my dream to be a psychologist."
Results like this "are not a good thing for the profession," Doran says.
Ameen agrees, especially given the fact that salaries in psychology have remained fairly stagnant in recent years. "The unfinished work that this article points to is the conversation about assessing the value of the psychology doctorate," he says. "In light of the costs, how are we positioning future psychologists to be financially and professionally viable? I think the field really needs time and focus to wrestle with this question."
Also a problem, Doran points out, is that the significant financial burden placed on students might keep the field from attracting the diverse workforce it needs to serve a diverse public.
"On the one hand, psychology is very much saying we need a diverse workforce, broadly defined — race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status," she says. "Yet at the same time, because of how expensive it is, it's very hard for people who don't come from privileged backgrounds to enter the field."
Ramani Durvasula, PhD, who chairs APA's Committee on Social and Economic Status (CSES), agrees with that assessment. She worries that the debt burden may disproportionately affect people like first-generation college students. "They don't have the family buy-in to ease their way. Those are precisely the people we are trying to get into the profession," says Durvasula, a psychology professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
Todd Avellar, a sixth-year PhD student in counseling/clinical/school psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara, knows that firsthand. He is a first-generation college student. Over his 10 years of schooling, he accumulated $110,000 in student loans — $30,000 from his undergraduate years and $80,000 from graduate school.
"My parents helped me as much as they could, but they didn't have much money either," he says. Now, as his parents — a retired factory worker and preschool teacher — get older, he wishes that he could do more to support them financially. But his debt makes even taking care of his own needs difficult.
"My car is about to give out sometime soon, and I need transportation to get to work," he says. "And I'm thinking, how can I possibly think about taking out a loan for a car when I have all these other loans?"
Would you choose psychology again, given your educational debt?
More awareness, education needed
One reason APAGS staff and members decided to conduct this new survey, according to Ameen, was to raise awareness about these issues among psychologists who have been out of school for a while and don't realize the staggering costs that current students take on.
"We don't discuss this enough as a training community," Ameen says. "Faculty may not have had to pay debt for a while, and students tend to keep their finances private."
He and others also want to address what they see as a "blame-the-victim" mentality among some in the field, which frames student debt as an individual rather than a systemic problem.
For example, they wanted to look into the question of whether students use loan money to fund lavish lifestyles, a perception Ameen says he's encountered often. So they asked respondents about cars, vacations and other aspects of their spending. They found that most students were living modestly and using their loan money to pay tuition and basic living expenses — the median amount spent on leisure travel, for example, was $400 per year, and the average student's car was 10 years old.
"I have actually been surprised at times about how judgmental people are about student debt," Durvasala says. "They say things like, [students] just need to work harder, get more jobs. … But our problem right now is that too many people have to come up with individual solutions and work themselves to the bone, rather than coming up with macro solutions as a field." Now Durvasula and the CSES, along with APAGS members and APA's Committee on Early Career Psychologists, are hoping to start that discussion. They've established a working group on the issue that will present a symposium on student debt at APA's 2016 Annual Convention in Denver, Aug. 4–7.
They are also working on drafting a resolution on the topic. It would be the first piece of APA legislation to address the issue of student debt, according to Kipp Pietrantonio, PhD, vice chair of the CSES and a psychologist at the Ohio State University student counseling center.
"We want to bring this to people's attention," Pietrantonio says. "It's not just ‘I'm not a student anymore, so student issues don't apply to me.'"
In the meantime, training programs have an important role to play in helping students and prospective students understand the lifelong consequences of their financial decisions, Ameen and the other study authors say.
One key is that prospective students should be fully informed of their financial prospects before they start a graduate program, says Nabil El-Ghoroury, PhD, associate executive director of APAGS and another co-author of the study. APAGS has a toolkit available to help students make that assessment. But training programs need to do more, the study authors say.
"Typically, at no point during the admissions process is information provided about the full cost of attending (including associated non-tuition expenses, such as attending conferences or buying assessment materials), limits on and consequences of borrowing, expected repayment terms or average monthly payment based on the amount of loans taken. … This information should be routinely provided by psychology programs to prospective students," they write.
For current students, El-Ghoroury says, the APAGS toolkit also offers information on loan repayment options, including the so-called "pay-as-you-earn" programsopens in new window that limit monthly payments to a percentage of your income, as well as the public service loan forgivenessopens in new window program. (For more ways to pay back loans, see the article "Got Debt?")
Such programs are crucial to helping current students and early career psychologists deal with the debt they've accumulated, El-Ghoroury says, and APA advocates for their protection and expansion.
But for future students, the key is education before that debt is taken on.
"Students need to take some agency and do research into the types of programs available, how much debt students graduate with, how much funding is available," says Doran. "And the training community needs to make a lot more of that information easily available."
Percentage of students and early career psychologists who reported life delays due to educational debt
