spunky

About a couple of years ago or so I took an internship on ETS and was particularly interested in working in the department that handles the GRE (& all the other post-grad tests like the PRAXIS and whatnot). Here are some of the things I took home from them:
 
- Every single study where the ETS claims you shouldn’t use a cut-off score is merely a formality that they use to prevent getting sued. Think about it… they want to sell you a product and then they’re gonna bash it? Of course not! Heck, if they were not sued they’d probably trumpet them as the secret oracle of success in graduate school. There are lists of results that are available to the public and there are lists of results that are only privy to ‘clients’ (e.g. universities). It’s mostly technical stuff and I never saw one but I knew from the people who worked on them that they were mostly devoted to come up with “diagnostic scores” which is the euphemism ETS uses for cut-scores. Funding agencies, AdComms, everybody is always asking you for the cut-score because they all need to make quick, easy decisions. Whether the decision is accurately reflected by the score or not is mostly irrelevant. That is one of the many dirty little secrets out there that you get to learn about if you hang around ETS.
 
- If a uni says the GRE is not required but ‘recommended’ you can bet your brownies they will use it against you.
 
- Psych (& other social sciences programs) relies on the quantitative score on the GRE for a very simple reason: it’s the one where psych majors tend to score the lowest. Just look at the table on p. 29 (http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf). You can see that around 60% of people with a major in Psych just meeerely scratched above the 50 th percentile.
 
The fact of the matter is that the number of GRE test takers is increasing exponentially and, with that, the number of applications that Psych (and other grad) departments receive every year. This is especially true after the 2008 crisis and the loss of value in a college degree. Anyone who has glanced at the sheer number of apps that departments receive every year knows that no prof is gonna take the time to look through 100s upon 100s of applications, especially if the POI is well-known and the program is prestigious. For clinical in my uni, for example, we got WAY over 300 applications for like… maybe 7-8 positions? No department is interested in spending the resources to evaluate applications holistically so unless there is something that REALLY makes you stand out (funding, publications in prestigious journals, your POI knows you, etc.) people are probably gonna default back to the GRE.
 
I dunno but I really don’t see this situation improving in any way in the short term, especially as the love affair between the U.S. and standardized testing just becomes deeper and deeper. 

actually, i added wrong lol... it's more like 80% (yes, that's EIGHTY percent) of applicants with a Psych major score just barely above the 50th percentile. the breakdown of the table (which is on page 30, not 29) to focus on is:
 
20%   - 140-144 (10th - 18th) 27.1% - 145-149 (21th - 37th) 24.8% - 150-154 (40th - 56th)   so 20% of psych majors score between the 10th - 18th percentile of the quant section (that's really, low), 27.1% score between the 21th and 37th percentile and 24.8% are in the 40th-56th percentile range.   if you add those three big groups to people who score below the 10th percentile (i.e. people for who numbers are really, really not their friends) then you get that around 80% of grad school applicants with a psych major score either at the 56th percentile or below on the quantitative portion of the GRE.   i think i'm starting to get now why my field of Quant Psych is so unpopular...LOL. 

actually, i added wrong lol... it's more like 80% (yes, that's EIGHTY percent) of applicants with a Psych major score just barely above the 50th percentile. the breakdown of the table (which is on page 30, not 29) to focus on is:
 
20%   - 140-144 (10th - 18th) 27.1% - 145-149 (21th - 37th) 24.8% - 150-154 (40th - 56th)   so 20% of psych majors score between the 10th - 18th percentile of the quant section (that's really, low), 27.1% score between the 21th and 37th percentile and 24.8% are in the 40th-56th percentile range.   if you add those three big groups to people who score below the 10th percentile (i.e. people for who numbers are really, really not their friends) then you get that around 80% of grad school applicants with a psych major score either at the 56th percentile or below on the quantitative portion of the GRE.   i think i'm starting to get now why my field of Quant Psych is so unpopular...LOL. 

About a couple of years ago or so I took an internship on ETS and was particularly interested in working in the department that handles the GRE (& all the other post-grad tests like the PRAXIS and whatnot). Here are some of the things I took home from them:
 
- Every single study where the ETS claims you shouldn’t use a cut-off score is merely a formality that they use to prevent getting sued. Think about it… they want to sell you a product and then they’re gonna bash it? Of course not! Heck, if they were not sued they’d probably trumpet them as the secret oracle of success in graduate school. There are lists of results that are available to the public and there are lists of results that are only privy to ‘clients’ (e.g. universities). It’s mostly technical stuff and I never saw one but I knew from the people who worked on them that they were mostly devoted to come up with “diagnostic scores” which is the euphemism ETS uses for cut-scores. Funding agencies, AdComms, everybody is always asking you for the cut-score because they all need to make quick, easy decisions. Whether the decision is accurately reflected by the score or not is mostly irrelevant. That is one of the many dirty little secrets out there that you get to learn about if you hang around ETS.
 
- If a uni says the GRE is not required but ‘recommended’ you can bet your brownies they will use it against you.
 
- Psych (& other social sciences programs) relies on the quantitative score on the GRE for a very simple reason: it’s the one where psych majors tend to score the lowest. Just look at the table on p. 29 (http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf). You can see that around 60% of people with a major in Psych just meeerely scratched above the 50 th percentile.
 
The fact of the matter is that the number of GRE test takers is increasing exponentially and, with that, the number of applications that Psych (and other grad) departments receive every year. This is especially true after the 2008 crisis and the loss of value in a college degree. Anyone who has glanced at the sheer number of apps that departments receive every year knows that no prof is gonna take the time to look through 100s upon 100s of applications, especially if the POI is well-known and the program is prestigious. For clinical in my uni, for example, we got WAY over 300 applications for like… maybe 7-8 positions? No department is interested in spending the resources to evaluate applications holistically so unless there is something that REALLY makes you stand out (funding, publications in prestigious journals, your POI knows you, etc.) people are probably gonna default back to the GRE.
 
I dunno but I really don’t see this situation improving in any way in the short term, especially as the love affair between the U.S. and standardized testing just becomes deeper and deeper. 

What do you mean by MIGHT actually be fun? It IS fun!  
 
It’s like the funniest thing ever! We have graphs! Lotsa them! With shiny colours! XD 

well... who knows! i mean, it's still not friday and someone told me today in class that they're taking bets to see who will be the last prof to send out invites... so apparently there are still a few.  but the official recruiting stuff is gonna happen this coming week so yeah.. there's not much time left.

from the few posts i read it doesn't seem like anyone applied to UBC but i feel compelled to share stuff . my friends in social/clinical said today that probably 99% of invites have already been sent out. there're still some last-minute profs but apparently friday will be the last day.

graduate school, all the way.
 
i went to a freakin' small liberal arts college in the middle of freakin' nowhere in the 'Bible Belt of Canada'. i met people there who literally had never left their hometown. EVER.
 
i remember the first day in a Sociology 101 class the prof was explaining some social myths like how what we call a 'traditional family' is a relatively new invention or that people lived longer before (which is a lie, given the advances we have in medicine today). then this girl raises her hand and says "oh, but long ago people used to
live like 100s of years!" the prof was like "oh really... like where? or who?" and the girl said "like Methuselah", took out her bible and quoted it. my first week of classes. my 2nd week in Canada. it was like the twilight zone.

thank you! that's very kind of you to say
 
 
it also helps out a lot that it's an English-focused program in an English-speaking country. that usually says a lot of good things about you when it comes to applying to other English-focused programs. 
 
 
 
well, Chubberubber mentioned it first and it reminded me of a lady from Portugal who posted here a few months ago who was in a somewhat similar situation to yours... she had done both an MA in Portugal AND in the UK, moved to California for some reason (she did not elaborate) and was finding it really tough to find a job because she did not have a licence (and California is one of the toughest states to get licensed at. almost EVERYTHING you do there asks you for some sort of licence or certification). unfortunately for her, she found out the hard way that her MA from the UK was basically worthless in California unless she went through the courses, did the supervised hours, took the exams etc... which apparently is not cheap. and most of the supervised hours/practicum that are needed for the licence usually happens through a university of institution of some sort. so if you're not really *IN* the system, it's hard to get those spaces. 
 
honestly, i'll have to leave the Clinical folk to answer your question regarding the MA from the UK and PhD from the U.S. question. because i'm not in clinical (although i work with them all the time and ask them tons of questions) all the people i know started their licensing process as soon as they could, which is during the first 2years of the MA-PhD stream that most Clinical programs in North America follow (i think it's called the Boulder Model or something). 
 
Frontal lobes' suggestion of somehow getting your foot in the door within the U.S. by working with someone who may have contacts there would probably be your best bet in terms of getting into graduate school. you really need to find ways to get yourself "in the system" through volunteering, being a research assistant, getting to know profs, etc. i know that's not possible for you right now, but it's just the way things work. 

i'm sorry to be a "glass-half-empty" kind of person but i'm not sure of how much it would gain you to obtain an MA from the UK unless you have a way to account for the funding situation. keep in mind that you are still going to be competing against domestic students for those coveted funded labs. would it improve your chances? absolutely! you would be exposed to research more, there won't be an empty time gap between your undergrad degree and your PhD application... i really can't see anything bad coming out of it. but i still feel the funding situation needs to be addressed somehow, if possible. and i know this for a fact because after i managed to squeeze myself into graduate school and started asking everybody why i was on the chopping block for rejections, everybody said the same thing: that i was a great candidate, but since i was an international student with limited funding options nobody wanted to even touch my applications.
 
from how you describe your options, it seems like you're already favouring the 2-year part-time option over the 1-year, full-time option, are you not?
 
oh! and Chubberubber made a very, very good point. if you want to practice as a clinician/do therapy in the U.S./Canada an MA is not enough. you need to be licensed. and from what i've heard  if you can't manage to get licensed in the state or province where you want to practice while you're still a student there's A LOT of paperwork, costs, exams and things you'll need to deal with. it's a lot easier if you're only focused on research.
 
what about doing both your MA and PhD in the UK? would that be an option

from an (ex-) foreign student to another, do not feel discouraged about this. there is one VERY, VERY big factor that can make you or break you when it comes to applying for programs in the U.S./Canada: funding, funding, funding.
 
resources are limited and every year there are more and more people applying and less and less money to go around for future students. it could well be that you were a stellar candidate but you didn't have any local agency in Greece or gov't grant to pay for your education. domestic/national students are given priority when it comes to things like this and by the time professors have taken their pick of potential students, there usually is either no room (or very few spaces left) for international students. 
 
to be honest with you, i would focus on trying to improve my CV by getting grants or scholarships so that you can demonstrate $$$ when you apply again. 

this is ridiculously true. the importance of being able to disagree (sometimes vocally) with your 'superiors' in academia is what fosters worthwhile dialogue and creativity. university departments need to be flexible enough to accommodate people with opposing ideas in order to benefit from diversity... and i'm not sure pluralism of ideas is something that the military values (chain of command, etc.)
 
with my advisor one of the things he likes the most about our labs (and encourages it) is to disagree with him and among ourselves so we can debate what we're doing and learn to see things from a different angle. if we added all this 'doctor' and 'calling people by their lastnames' it would just be... i dunno, super weird.
 
and no, i'm no veteran whatsoever. WAY too free-spirited for that ;-) 

will it be enough? to be honest, i don't know. but there is one thing i can tell you for sure: it definitely would not hurt.    as someone who lives and dies by data and finds it fun to hang around in webpages like the U.S. Census Bureau or the OCED's Economic Report the one thing i can say is that, setting aside anyone's immediate experience (including mine), times are tough when it comes to getting a job. when i was researching unemployment and underemployment for post-graduate degree holders during the summer (so basically asking the question whether the ROI, Return On Investment, was worthwhile for MA/PhDs) i kept a separate analysis for Psychology because of the weird claims i found on websites like these: http://www.csbsju.edu/psychology/student-resources/doctorate, http://persistentastonishment.blogspot.ca/2011/05/six-graphs-answer-questions-about-phd.html)where the claim about unemployment at the PhD level for Psychology was at 1% or better than for other scientists.    the thing is that when you look at the original source of the data, the story is a tad bit more interesting. most people cite the National Science Foundation (NSF, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctoratework/#tabs-1)survey of doctorate recepients to monitor more or less how PhD's are doing across the board in the U.S. (i wish we had something like that in Canada). now, if you just look at the most recent numbers from 2013 (the pre-eliminary results were just released last Septmeber) it says, just as described, that unemployment for PhDs in Psychology is at 1.4%. but just look at how they define "unemployment" in the very, very tiny footnote of the survey:   "Unemployed includes individuals who were not working during the survey reference week but had been seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or who were on layoff from their job"   "seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or laid off"? that doesn't tell us anything about the people after the 4-week period or who haven't been able to land a job after their PhD completion. but there is a much more informative (and, at least to me, somewhat alarming) statistic which is the percentage of PhDs in psychology who are employed full-time: 64.47% so, sure, the majority of PhDs are still employed full-time... but that's what? a 14% better chance than the flip of a (fair) coin?     ideally, it would be great to have more up-to-date statistics where they break it down by areas of Psychology, because i suspect a lot of the employment numbers could be driven by people in Clinical, Counselling and other Health Services areas whereas people in primarily research-oriented programs (Social, Personality, Cognitive, Neuro/Biopsych, etc.) who would ideally jump into tenure-track positions could be having a tougher time landing a job (but this is a hypothesis of mine. no data to back that up). another thing you can see (but you'll have to look through the data of the previous years) is that the participation of PhDs in the private sector has increased (albeit very slowly) over the years and enrollment in post-docs has sky-rocketed. so the interesting question here is how many people are being driven to pursue a post-doc out of need rather than actual interest. although the demands of the job-market for tenure-track positions (whatever few are left of them) are probably making the post-doc a necessity.   the best i was able to do was look through the Center for Workforce Studies for the APA (http://www.apa.org/workforce/index.aspx) that surveys PhDs in Psych per area in terms of employment, type of positions they get, starting salaries, etc. unfortunately, the most up-to-date survey on doctorate employment that they have available is from 2009, although the trends they report mimic the ones from the NSF survey quite a bit. they report 63% full-time employment for Psych PhDs with the caveat that full-time employment numbers have been decreasing since the 1980s. they do present a break-down of employability per-area but i'm not sure how i feel about their numbers. like they say "only 25% of clinical neuropsychology doctorates were employed full time at the time of the study" but only 9 people self-identified themselves as clinical neuropsychologists. you see 100% employment in Sports Psychology, but there was only 1 respondent. i guess we'll have to wait until their next survey results are published to see how much things have changed during these last 4 years.   now, if you turn around and look at the skills being required by private industries right now, you can see a lot of published research and news articles that lament the low numbers of college graduates in STEM areas and how technical knowledge is the primary skill employers are looking for. the technical knowledge that most Psychologists develop (to a certain extent) is research design and data analysis. i think it is a worthwhile investment of anyone's time to learn how to do this because you never know what's gonna happen in the future. better be ready for it

i believe this is a condition commonly referred to as "being human"

well, that sounds to me then that you've already made your choice and just need someone to push you over the edge, so i'll do it then:
 
GO, FLY TO MEDICAL SCHOOL! BE FREEEEEEEEE!!!

well, that sounds to me then that you've already made your choice and just need someone to push you over the edge, so i'll do it then:
 
GO, FLY TO MEDICAL SCHOOL! BE FREEEEEEEEE!!!

well, that sounds to me then that you've already made your choice and just need someone to push you over the edge, so i'll do it then:
 
GO, FLY TO MEDICAL SCHOOL! BE FREEEEEEEEE!!!

ok... you're definitely not the *worst* case i've seen (i coach students, particularly undergrads, on how to become financially self-sufficient. especially for people who don't have STEM degrees).
 
the part i feel iffy about med school is not the succeeding at it (you seem more than motivated for it) but the getting in part. med schools are still insanely competitive and if you have to go back for a year, empty your savings account and may not end up getting in, then you're gonna be a lot worse than you started. 
 
now, i'm pretty sure you're only willing to consider programs where you'll be fully funded (so at least you can stop the free fall into debt) and cognitive psych actually has some cool extensions to industry stuff (the ones i know the most are in computers) that you could use if a tenure-track position doesn't materialize. 
 
ok, this is what *I* would do in your position, given the very limited input i know from your situation. UNLESS i could confidently say i can get into some medschool (and hence gamble with the personal savings) i would probably stick with the cognitive track, only consider seriously positions that give me a free ride and dwell into programming as much as i can. i dunno why but i see a lot of people in cognitive psych actually being very good with computers... both for data analysis or programming in general and take as many consulting/tutoring/will-analyze-your-data-for-money (or do any sort of technical skills) jobs on the side as i could. the one thing that you can have going is that many people within the social sciences in general are not particularly fond of technical knowledge. a lot of profs with juicy grant$ are probably gonna be super happy of having  someone with certain level of skill in their labs who can deal with that stuff. if you play your cards right and are always open to the idea of branching out outside of your area, i could see it possible for you to actually start bringing that debt closer and closer to 0.
 
what happens after the debt is up to you... but the more you branch out, the higher the chance you won't be stuck in the limbo of underemployment. 

will it be enough? to be honest, i don't know. but there is one thing i can tell you for sure: it definitely would not hurt.    as someone who lives and dies by data and finds it fun to hang around in webpages like the U.S. Census Bureau or the OCED's Economic Report the one thing i can say is that, setting aside anyone's immediate experience (including mine), times are tough when it comes to getting a job. when i was researching unemployment and underemployment for post-graduate degree holders during the summer (so basically asking the question whether the ROI, Return On Investment, was worthwhile for MA/PhDs) i kept a separate analysis for Psychology because of the weird claims i found on websites like these: http://www.csbsju.edu/psychology/student-resources/doctorate, http://persistentastonishment.blogspot.ca/2011/05/six-graphs-answer-questions-about-phd.html)where the claim about unemployment at the PhD level for Psychology was at 1% or better than for other scientists.    the thing is that when you look at the original source of the data, the story is a tad bit more interesting. most people cite the National Science Foundation (NSF, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctoratework/#tabs-1)survey of doctorate recepients to monitor more or less how PhD's are doing across the board in the U.S. (i wish we had something like that in Canada). now, if you just look at the most recent numbers from 2013 (the pre-eliminary results were just released last Septmeber) it says, just as described, that unemployment for PhDs in Psychology is at 1.4%. but just look at how they define "unemployment" in the very, very tiny footnote of the survey:   "Unemployed includes individuals who were not working during the survey reference week but had been seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or who were on layoff from their job"   "seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or laid off"? that doesn't tell us anything about the people after the 4-week period or who haven't been able to land a job after their PhD completion. but there is a much more informative (and, at least to me, somewhat alarming) statistic which is the percentage of PhDs in psychology who are employed full-time: 64.47% so, sure, the majority of PhDs are still employed full-time... but that's what? a 14% better chance than the flip of a (fair) coin?     ideally, it would be great to have more up-to-date statistics where they break it down by areas of Psychology, because i suspect a lot of the employment numbers could be driven by people in Clinical, Counselling and other Health Services areas whereas people in primarily research-oriented programs (Social, Personality, Cognitive, Neuro/Biopsych, etc.) who would ideally jump into tenure-track positions could be having a tougher time landing a job (but this is a hypothesis of mine. no data to back that up). another thing you can see (but you'll have to look through the data of the previous years) is that the participation of PhDs in the private sector has increased (albeit very slowly) over the years and enrollment in post-docs has sky-rocketed. so the interesting question here is how many people are being driven to pursue a post-doc out of need rather than actual interest. although the demands of the job-market for tenure-track positions (whatever few are left of them) are probably making the post-doc a necessity.   the best i was able to do was look through the Center for Workforce Studies for the APA (http://www.apa.org/workforce/index.aspx) that surveys PhDs in Psych per area in terms of employment, type of positions they get, starting salaries, etc. unfortunately, the most up-to-date survey on doctorate employment that they have available is from 2009, although the trends they report mimic the ones from the NSF survey quite a bit. they report 63% full-time employment for Psych PhDs with the caveat that full-time employment numbers have been decreasing since the 1980s. they do present a break-down of employability per-area but i'm not sure how i feel about their numbers. like they say "only 25% of clinical neuropsychology doctorates were employed full time at the time of the study" but only 9 people self-identified themselves as clinical neuropsychologists. you see 100% employment in Sports Psychology, but there was only 1 respondent. i guess we'll have to wait until their next survey results are published to see how much things have changed during these last 4 years.   now, if you turn around and look at the skills being required by private industries right now, you can see a lot of published research and news articles that lament the low numbers of college graduates in STEM areas and how technical knowledge is the primary skill employers are looking for. the technical knowledge that most Psychologists develop (to a certain extent) is research design and data analysis. i think it is a worthwhile investment of anyone's time to learn how to do this because you never know what's gonna happen in the future. better be ready for it

I did find the Adrian article interesting. It's part of a new consumer-based mindset movement taking places in terms of paying for education. It's too bad our society does not put more pressure on other institutions to do things like this. Hopefully, other universities will follow suit in efforts to be more competitive, and eventually the "College on credit" mentality will disappear because of better informed families making better decision. 
Sigh...if only I knew better when I was young. I guess I'll make sure to inform my future children not to fall prey like I did. That is, if I can ever afford children...

will it be enough? to be honest, i don't know. but there is one thing i can tell you for sure: it definitely would not hurt.    as someone who lives and dies by data and finds it fun to hang around in webpages like the U.S. Census Bureau or the OCED's Economic Report the one thing i can say is that, setting aside anyone's immediate experience (including mine), times are tough when it comes to getting a job. when i was researching unemployment and underemployment for post-graduate degree holders during the summer (so basically asking the question whether the ROI, Return On Investment, was worthwhile for MA/PhDs) i kept a separate analysis for Psychology because of the weird claims i found on websites like these: http://www.csbsju.edu/psychology/student-resources/doctorate, http://persistentastonishment.blogspot.ca/2011/05/six-graphs-answer-questions-about-phd.html)where the claim about unemployment at the PhD level for Psychology was at 1% or better than for other scientists.    the thing is that when you look at the original source of the data, the story is a tad bit more interesting. most people cite the National Science Foundation (NSF, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctoratework/#tabs-1)survey of doctorate recepients to monitor more or less how PhD's are doing across the board in the U.S. (i wish we had something like that in Canada). now, if you just look at the most recent numbers from 2013 (the pre-eliminary results were just released last Septmeber) it says, just as described, that unemployment for PhDs in Psychology is at 1.4%. but just look at how they define "unemployment" in the very, very tiny footnote of the survey:   "Unemployed includes individuals who were not working during the survey reference week but had been seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or who were on layoff from their job"   "seeking work in the prior 4 weeks or laid off"? that doesn't tell us anything about the people after the 4-week period or who haven't been able to land a job after their PhD completion. but there is a much more informative (and, at least to me, somewhat alarming) statistic which is the percentage of PhDs in psychology who are employed full-time: 64.47% so, sure, the majority of PhDs are still employed full-time... but that's what? a 14% better chance than the flip of a (fair) coin?     ideally, it would be great to have more up-to-date statistics where they break it down by areas of Psychology, because i suspect a lot of the employment numbers could be driven by people in Clinical, Counselling and other Health Services areas whereas people in primarily research-oriented programs (Social, Personality, Cognitive, Neuro/Biopsych, etc.) who would ideally jump into tenure-track positions could be having a tougher time landing a job (but this is a hypothesis of mine. no data to back that up). another thing you can see (but you'll have to look through the data of the previous years) is that the participation of PhDs in the private sector has increased (albeit very slowly) over the years and enrollment in post-docs has sky-rocketed. so the interesting question here is how many people are being driven to pursue a post-doc out of need rather than actual interest. although the demands of the job-market for tenure-track positions (whatever few are left of them) are probably making the post-doc a necessity.   the best i was able to do was look through the Center for Workforce Studies for the APA (http://www.apa.org/workforce/index.aspx) that surveys PhDs in Psych per area in terms of employment, type of positions they get, starting salaries, etc. unfortunately, the most up-to-date survey on doctorate employment that they have available is from 2009, although the trends they report mimic the ones from the NSF survey quite a bit. they report 63% full-time employment for Psych PhDs with the caveat that full-time employment numbers have been decreasing since the 1980s. they do present a break-down of employability per-area but i'm not sure how i feel about their numbers. like they say "only 25% of clinical neuropsychology doctorates were employed full time at the time of the study" but only 9 people self-identified themselves as clinical neuropsychologists. you see 100% employment in Sports Psychology, but there was only 1 respondent. i guess we'll have to wait until their next survey results are published to see how much things have changed during these last 4 years.   now, if you turn around and look at the skills being required by private industries right now, you can see a lot of published research and news articles that lament the low numbers of college graduates in STEM areas and how technical knowledge is the primary skill employers are looking for. the technical knowledge that most Psychologists develop (to a certain extent) is research design and data analysis. i think it is a worthwhile investment of anyone's time to learn how to do this because you never know what's gonna happen in the future. better be ready for it

it depends. in my opinion, if you gravitate towards something like gov't contracts or the FDA, SAS is the way to go. SAS has pretty much a monopoly in clinical trials and research.
 
but if you're gonna do big data analytics, market research and, in general, more of the "cool/hip" stuff, i'd say R and some database management program. python is also very good to know. 
 
i do all my private consulting in R both for students, profs and private clients and haven't had any problems. that's what's paying my bills right now because my funding/stipend is just too low....

i think this cannot be highlighted enough. the emphasis of psychology on data analysis is probably one of the strongest assets that we have over many other social sciences. there is more data to be analyzed out there in the world than people who are capable of doing it and, for better or worse, i think the best/more interesting positions are available for people who've gone beyond the basic SPSS stuff and can handle some programming in R/SAS/STATA and some database management like SQL.   within my program, for instance, all graduates who were willing to look for positions outside academia were snatched by companies even before they finished their PhDs (actually, 2 didn't even make it past the university door because the university offered them a job  ). a good example i know is a friend of mine who jumped the ladder all the way up to research director straight out of graduate school because of her good technical skills in manipulating and making sense of data.   i honestly feel that if more senior undergrads or early-year MA students in the social sciences knew the importance of data analysis in today's world (and the absolute dire situation of the job market both inside and outside academia) then everybody would aim for getting a strong quantitative training. the difference in terms of starting salaries, job opportunities, etc. for those with advanced quantiative training VS little-to-none quantitative training is papable, to say the least. 

i believe this is a condition commonly referred to as "being human"

i believe this is a condition commonly referred to as "being human"