On 2% Acceptance Rates - Is the (Social)Psychology PhD a Crapshoot?

[angeladl6007]

Don't worry, I take no offense.

[avidman]

I think this is a really interesting conversation and something that should be addressed.

 

I currently work in a lab and my boss has told me time and time again the difficulties of getting a job in academia after getting a PhD. The realism is simply this: It is hard.

 

But as difficult as it is, there is a crossroads of sorts that manifests during this time - Pursue what you (think you) love, or pursue what will likely get you a job. If you pursue what you love and can't get a job, will you regret it? If you pursue a career that will make you money, will you be happy?

 

Maybe I am fortunate (or just masochistic or stupid for that matter), but I believe the best thing to do is to follow what your heart says. Whatever you end up choosing, just be sure it is something you won't regret.

 

With that all said, I got accepted into the no.1 Social Program in the country, and I am not taking it because I received an offer from another school that fits my liking better. The chances of getting a Post-Doc after are slim, but I'm going for it, and the chances of getting a job as a professor are even slimmer, but to me, I'd rather pursue the chance than be a potato.

 

Also, on a huge aside, regardless of whether you pursue Social or whatever, programming is borderline a necessity in this growing technological age. So no matter what happens, if you pick up that skill, there will be safety nets.

 

So best of luck everyone. Not sure if this helps.

[juilletmercredi]

I am practical, but cautiously optimistic.

 

Part of it is because I have to be - I'll be on the job market in the fall, and if I think about this pessimistically I'll drive myself nuts.

 

But part of of it is supported by some evidence. I'm a social/health psychologist (went to a hybrid program). Yes, social psychology PhD programs are very competitive - and that feels very uncomfortable on the front end, when applying. But the competitiveness is good in the sense that TXInstrument11 points out - because that's fewer people competing for the same resources in grad school and the same jobs outside it. Probably still too many to sustain a healthy job market, but less than if acceptance rates were higher.

 

On a very broad level, a 2013 Georgetown report found that the unemployment rate for psychology majors with a graduate degree was only 3.6%. The median salary was $61,000. This includes psychology majors with any kind of gradaute degree, but it's pretty promising IMO. Not the riches of Midas, but there are reasonably good chances that I will get a job and make a middle-class income. That unemployment rate is actually not much higher than the unemployment rate for electrical engineers with graduate degrees (3%) or mathematics majors with graduate degrees (2.9%) and it's the same as computer science majors with graduate degrees (3.6%).* Salaries are really where they beat us out.

 

The Survey of Earned Doctorates is another place to look; it's the survey that most universities these days require you to take and the NSF compiles the information. You usually take it at the time that you deposit your dissertation (or at least you did at my university), so you get a sense of what commitments people had at the time that they were really finishing up their program. It seemed rather dismal for psychology - 2,088 out of 3,600 psychology PhD recipients (58%) had a commitment after graduate school.  A little over half of those commitments were postdoctoral fellowships; only about 5% of psycholgy PhD recipients went into industry right after graduate school.

 

But then I checked out other fields.  Only 50% of engineering PhDs had a definite commitment at graduation (and there's not much variation when you break it out by specific engineering field - about 58% of aerospace engineers, on down to about 50% of electrical engineers). In biology and the biomedical sciences, it's about 50%. In chemistry, it's 54%. Computer science PhDs and math PhDs only fared slightly better than psychology PhDs, at 60% each. In physics and astronomy it was 57%. It doesn't look like the physical/mathematical/computer sciences in general are doing that much better than us in terms of securing employment at graduation.

 

The percentages are slightly higher if you only take into account U.S. citizens and permanent residents (we go to 63%), but don't vary that much in differences - computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, biologists and chemists are still doing about the same as us, and engineering PhDs are actually doing a little worse than us overall, although some subfields (aerospace engineering = 66%) are better than others (materials science engineering = 54%)

 

Actually, the folks doing the best seem to be economists - about 67% of economics PhDs did have a definite commitment at graduation/the time of taking the survey, and that went up to 75% if you counted only U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

 

Again, median base salaries are where the differences are - it's about $61,000 for psychologists, $75,000 for life scientists, $94,700 for physical scientists and $96,000 for engineers. (This is for the employed, not postdocs. Their postdocs make sligtly more but not a whole lot.)

 

The NSF also has data on overall unemployment rates - that is, unemployment for any holder of a PhD, not just recent graduates. Overall, the unemployment rate is very, very low. No major field's rate rose above 5%, even in the deep days of the recession. For 2010, the unemployment rate of doctoral degree holders in psychology was 1.7% - actually lower than the physical sciences (3.5%) and engineering (2.8%), and about the same as mathematics and statistics (1.5%) and computer science (2.2%). Our rates are probably partially deflated by clinical and counseling psychologists, who make up the bulk of psychology PhD recipients in our field, but even without them our rates are probably still quite low.

 

It's true that the academic job market is pretty bad, which is why I always tell my undergrads hoping for a doctoral degree that they should only get one if they would be happy spending 5-10 years pursuing a PhD only to not be a professor, but maybe do something else just as interesting. But PhD recipients get jobs. And they're not all working at Starbucks or McDonald's. Most of them, it appears, are not.

 

The way I see it...I have skills.  I write well, present excellently, I can do advanced statistical analysis, I can clearly synthesize huge amounts of information, I can teach myself something new lightning fast. Even if I don't get an academic job, there are a lot of other things that I could successfully do. The chances are good that I will get a job, a job that pays a middle-class wage.

 

Here is a heartening read from Donald Asher.

 

I will bring attention to one thing he does say, though, which I wholeheartedly agree with:

 

For forty years there have been predictions of a mass exodus of faculty, as older faculty retire, and for forty years those predictions have been premature or overstated. There is currently another wave of such pronouncements, but a smart prospective PhD student would be mindful of the history of those forecasts.

 

Professors have literally been saying this since the 1980s. It hasn't come true yet - it probably never well.  Ever since the mandatory retirement age was abolished professors can retire whenever they want - some of them never fully retire. And even when they do, the modern university is replacing their tenure lines with adjuncts or non-tenure-track positions. So I don't think the market is going to get markedly bettter in the coming 10-15 years; instead, I think that the modern PhD applicant needs to be well-prepared for the likelihood that she won't be an academic, but there's probably something else interesting that she can do with her degree and still feed herself and her family.

 

*A lot of people think computer science majors have so many more job prospects - it certainly seems that way - but the unemployment rate of recent college grad CS majors (8.7%) is about the same as that of recent college grad psychology majors (9.2%), and they stay similar after experience and after graduate degrees.  Salaries are where they beat us.

 

Sources: 

 

Georgetown "Hard Times" report

PhDs in the labor force

Survey of Earned Doctorates

[.letmeinplz//]

 

 

*A lot of people think computer science majors have so many more job prospects - it certainly seems that way - but the unemployment rate of recent college grad CS majors (8.7%) is about the same as that of recent college grad psychology majors (9.2%), and they stay similar after experience and after graduate degrees.  Salaries are where they beat us.

 

What is the rate of psychology majors working a job not in their field? If "McDonalds Manager" counts as employment for a recent psychology major grad then the rate comparisons mean nothing.

[spunky]

 

The NSF also has data on overall unemployment rates - that is, unemployment for any holder of a PhD, not just recent graduates. Overall, the unemployment rate is very, very low. No major field's rate rose above 5%, even in the deep days of the recession. 

 

well... did you notice that ini mini tiny little note on how the NSF (or any other federal agency) defines 'unemployment'?

 

it's Footnote #4 here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/(or in any other of their footnotes):

 

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.

 

Which means:

 

- if you have been looking for work for longer than 4 weeks at the time of the survey, you didn't get counted.

- if you don't have a job but have stopped looking because you're discouraged/tired you don't get counted (<-- happens A LOT in post-recession economies)

- if you're on some sort of disability or had a child or something, even though you still need a job then you also don't get counted.

 

so i always tend to feel iffy about these unemployment statistics. plus, like <ian> said, we need focus on the much more pervasive and much harder to measure cousin of unemployment, UNDERemployment . right next to my apartment building there's this lady with an MA in School Psych serving tea in a fancy tea house. the NSF (or its Canadian equivalent) would not count her as 'unemployed' yet i'm willing to bet my brownies you don't need an MA to serve tea. and this is what i think most people are interested in knowing. 

 

 i'm currently looking for the APA source where i found that more PhD earners in Psychology are part-time employed now that full-time employed, which i think tends to paint a better picture of these trends but i'm being unsuccessful

 

 

overall, i do like the "cautiously optimistic" approach you preach. my grandma used to call it something like "prepare for the worst but hope for the best". there is at least ONE marketable skill that anyone with a PhD in Psychology can always bank on, regardless of the area: we know how to do research. now, research can take many shapes and forms, but we all have to learn at least the very basics of it and i think if anyone can focus on how to expand that into other more applied settings, then you do have at least a slight advantage over your average recent-college grad.

 

if EVERTHING else fails peepz, just remember at least one thing: Jenna Marbles has a Master's Degree in Sports/Counselling Psych from BostonU and she's the 7th most-subscribed youtuber! if she can do it, so can you! put your degree to a good use!

 

[juilletmercredi]

I love Jenna Marbles!

 

I don't want to write another book but here is a bit:

 

-I looked up underemployment, which is a concept I have some issue with - particularly at the PhD level, because 80% of the jobs that require a PhD are in academia - but still. There's a study that measured underemployment in recent college graduates (aged 22-27) using the BLS data. They defined "underemployed" as a job for which more than half the respondents to a BLS O*Net survey said a bachelor's degree was not required to do the job (not whether the job ad they responded to required it, and these were employees, not employers).

 

For BA holders, about 48% of social science majors were underemployed, compared with about 50% of business majors, 43% of science majors, 29% of math and computer majors, and 25% of engineering majors. So it does look like social scientists are more likely to be considered underemployed.  However, only 20% of the underemployed work low-wage jobs, defined as unskilled jobs where the wage is less than $25,000 a year (which includes most retail, food service, and bartending jobs). A significant proportion (around 40%) of the underemployed recent college graduates are in what are considered "good non-college jobs" - jobs that technically don't require a bachelor's degree but have average salaries around $45,000 and are career-oriented and skilled.

 

These statistics do not include PhD holders, though. We are not recent college graduates anymore, regardless of age - we now fall into the category of PhD/professional degree holder, or the more general "graduate degree holder." I couldn't find any reliable statistics on how many PhDs are doing low-wage work/unskilled work. The BLS does say that only 22% of "PhD/professional degree holders" are underemployed, though.

 

There are, of course, flaws with every study and measurement. My point was simply that if you get a PhD in social psychology (or anything, really), you are very unlikely to be working as a McDonald's cashier or a Starbucks barista, much less unemployed altogether. It was meant to be encouraging.

 

Sources:

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci20-1.pdf

[TenaciousBushLeaper]

I love Jenna Marbles!

 

 

Soon the day is upon us where a good amount of pos-docs, and new professors know most if not all of the youtube celebrities 

[mb712]

I bet Jenna Marbles would be able to make an awesome video about this topic.

(Speaking of people with psych graduate degrees that ended up being relatively useless...)

[TheMercySeat]

"Who did you study with? ...I never heard of him."

(My internal dialogue) "Funny... I never heard of you, either. Oh, that's why... While you and your colleagues fight over 100k grants, my colleagues win multimillion dollar research grants."

I am quickly losing faith in this process

[Chubberubber]

Veryinteresting topic and enlightening comments. Thank you all for your in-depth look at this!

I think part of the problem is not just the employment prospects of fresh psychology Ph.Ds, but more so the "return on investment". As the data shown here suggests, our future salaries are hardly high enough to support a family with (assuming this is the family's primary salary), and we should ask ourselves wether it's worth it to work 5+ years for $15 an hour (for a $30K stipend) just to secure a $61K per year job, let a lone if even that salary isn't secured due to possible low job security. I don't have a clear answer for myself, but one future possible career track I'm looking at is policy planning where at least the job security is a bit higher than in adjunct/ non tenure-track positions in academia.

[TheMercySeat]

Veryinteresting topic and enlightening comments. Thank you all for your in-depth look at this!

I think part of the problem is not just the employment prospects of fresh psychology Ph.Ds, but more so the "return on investment". As the data shown here suggests, our future salaries are hardly high enough to support a family with (assuming this is the family's primary salary), and we should ask ourselves wether it's worth it to work 5+ years for $15 an hour (for a $30K stipend) just to secure a $61K per year job, let a lone if even that salary isn't secured due to possible low job security. I don't have a clear answer for myself, but one future possible career track I'm looking at is policy planning where at least the job security is a bit higher than in adjunct/ non tenure-track positions in academia.

TRAITOR!!!

Academia is the ONLY noble route. Only people who are privileged enough to afford college are worthy of your effort and talents.

...Kidding, of course!!!!

Edited February 24, 2015 by TheMercySeat