Response from Minnesota

"We don't know who J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, Ph. D. is or how he got hold of our Psych Major listserv, but his message about career ladders in psychology is a severe departure from the realities as we know them. Yes, we do have data on this: the success of our graduates and our experiences in recruiting faculty members for UMM.

We regularly tell you that professional status as a psychologist requires a higher degree, preferably a doctoral degree, so no one should be surprised that our UMM BA does not by itself confer professional status as a sychologist; and yet our BA graduates generally find employment in human-services-related areas within not too many weeks of starting a serious job search. Our Career Center logs a very low unemployment rate for UMM graduates in general, including graduated Psych majors.

Psychology is also, of course, a liberal arts degree that is valued by employers looking simply for well-educated graduates. Some of our graduates, who deliberately did not go into psychological job tracks, have ended up byt their choice as social workers, government administrators, attorneys, physicians, nurses, editors, real estate developers, and many other kinds of satisfying occupations. See the Career Center web site on this [LINK OMITTED]:

More to the point, the great majority of well-qualified UMM applicants to graduate school are admitted somewhere (not necessarily to their first-choice schools) and the UMM Psych graduates who obtained doctorates in psychology and whom we have tracked have ended up as successful clinical, counseling, and organizational psychologists, research psychologists in academe and industry, and professors, mostly tenure-track, at a wide range of universities and colleges. They have pretty much followed their intended career tracks.

"If you ask us, we will be happy to tell you what we think your chances are of admission to a graduate program, which depends on your grades, test scores, research accomplishments, and other experiences. To read more regarding the graduate scene, go to our web document on this. We also have information from our searches for new faculty. We have generally managed to attract very capable psychologists to teach at UMM, but when we advertise tenure-track positions we are by no means flooded with hundreds of applications. There are many good academic positions at universities and colleges, and so far as we can tell, most well-qualified applicants find suitable academic employment.

"Occasionally people fail. To stay employed in academia requires doing a good job of teaching and, in many places, such as UMM, research. Not everyone comes up to the necessary standards, and they are more likely to bounce around among unsatisfactory jobs. That has certainly not been the case for most UMM Psych majors who went on to complete their graduate training."

"Going back to Ehrenfels' document, his argument does not withstand scruitiny. He rejects statistics he doesn't like and builds his argument on misleading numbers. For instance, not all the part-time adjunct faculty in psychology are doing this perforce. For many it is a satisfying sideline to complement their clinical (or other applied) practices. I know of many such cases, people who don't want full-time academic jobs but enjoy maintaining some academic activity. Graduate departments with clinical training programs regularly employ such practitioners part-time to teach or supervise clinical graduate students. Community colleges often employ practitioners to teach particular courses. To take a raw percentage of faculty who are part-time or adjunct faculty masks this picture.

"All vocations in this country are competitive, and there are few guarantees of success or perpetual employment. Even tenured faculty can be fired (and have been, even at UMM!), and the occupations that seem sure-fire glamor professions at one point in time may see massive unemployment at other times. We have witnessed this with engineers, web-site developers, programmers, economists, physicists, lawyers, etc. No one canforetell the future, but if you enjoy psychology, believe you have the ability to succeed in psychology, and do what you need to do to compete, you very likely will succeed. We, your faculty, stand ready to help you any way we can."

Response from Wyatt Ehrenfels

"Before we get any further into your response, I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify a couple points. It's not like I had to break a few windows to gain entrance to your forum. The forum appeared in a Google search of psychology listservs and, upon discovering it, I noticed there were no restrictions on membership."

"My report is not intended to damage anyone's career aspirations. Only the Department of Psychology can do this by fostering unrealistic expectations. If your department is unlike any of the departments I have encountered in my travels, then nothing I have written should surprise anyone. Departments responsible with career information are right up there with Earth-like plants outside the solar system. We know they're out there. We just haven't found them yet."

"I'd like to see this data. I'd be curious to know if it deviates from the national average. If you conduct employment outcome research regularly, then you should be commended. I did not know of any departments that follow up on the employment of Bacceleurates, and no alarms go off when the job market can no longer absorb enough Bacceleurate recipients. I would not expect psychology professors to take an interest in employment outcomes given the fact they seem to tolerate quite well the staggering low percentage of Bacceleurates with advanced aspirations who cannot find their way into a doctoral program. And let's face it. Some things just can't be measured. The University of Minnesota may be plenty happy that a former psychology major went back to school for a nursing degree, but what about the nurse? Was this her first choice? If she could do it all over again, would she major in psychology? This is the question we need on our employment satisfaction surveys. Not just Where are you now? and How do you like it?. We need to rule out that the Health Care Industry rescued these psychology castoffs. You are assuming that the Psychology Bacceleurates who ultimately became programmers did not at one time yearn to be a therapist or a tenured professor. I know many Psychology castoffs who learned they needed to return to school for another degree to avoid wandering through the labor wilderness as marginally viable job candidates. And I suspect there is no shortage of Psychology Bacceleurate recipients who realized they could accomplish this on the cheap by downloading free demos of software. The melting pot Information Technology Industry, which for years and even to this day does not require computer science degrees and official certifications for viability (i.e. just technical proficiency), absorbed castoffs from many fields. But just as certain as I am that New Jersey will run out of places to store solid waste from New York, changes in the labor market will make it much tougher for dislocated graduates to find work in Information Technology. (It will not be quite as simple as getting out of bed in the 1990s). Having been employed by one dot.com myself, I counted among the credentials of my colleagues a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Film, an M.A. in Marketing, a PhD in Electrical Engineering, and lo and behold, a former baseball player with a B.A. in Computer Science. And while these individuals might tell you they were happy enough with the way things turned out (hell, I enjoyed my free Cokes and catered tri-colored tortelli lunches), none of these individuals envisioned themselves as dot.com employees. I also know a lot of adjunct faculty who were for all intents and purposes unemployed. They worked at Starbucks or Blockbuster Video during the day and by night they taught a semester of Psych 101 for $2,000. They could hardly make ends meet, and they could hardly bring themselves to admit they were not part of the field. If they participated in the same National Science Foundation employment survey I completed, I strongly suspect they would have given a misleading response to the question prompting them to affirm or deny employment in the field. And I'd be interested to know just what proportion of these sweat shop workers reserved hope that by teaching in an adjunct capacity, they were continuing to keep their degree current, building a CV, and jockeying for position in the hopes a tenure-track assistant professorship opened up in the department in which they taught while they were teaching. These were the primary reasons cited for teaching in an adjunct capacity among the adjunct faculty I know. But if you have any doubts, visit some of the message boards on the Adjunct Nation web site.

"Currently, students just assume that the market can absorb them. After all, it's not like universities keep their fingers on the pulse of the job market. , and it's not as though universities will notice when they're plodding into the future with outdated curriculum requirements and department structure. Employers have complained for years about the basic skills and overall job readiness of Bacceleurate recipients and, until the trade-school-turned-university "DeVry Institute" can turn out enough graduates, universities can afford to turn a deaf ear. There's some justification for this as well as the prime directive of universities is to provide a good liberal arts education and not job training. Psychology is one of the most popular majors, and universities will continue admitting into the major as many student-customers as it can fit in its classrooms.

Now of "the great majority of well-qualified UMM applicants to graduate school are admitted somewhere" (and I'd like to see data on this), that is certainly well above the national average. Though I think we should make a distinction between terminal MA/MS programs and PhD programs. Do students know just how difficult it is to find admission to a doctoral program? Many students have to settle for terminal MA/MS programs thinking it will be easier with the MA/MS to get into a PhD program. I don't believe this is true. Also, when they do succeed, many MA/MS recipients learn the new PhD program will not waive course requirements, credits, and in some cases, even the masters thesis. They in effect start from scratch, the only thing to show for their MA/MS is the admission to the PhD program. Does anyone really have any data on this? Until someone does, people like myself will speak from much-maligned anecdotal evidence (i.e. from life experience).

MINNESOTA: " ... There are many good academic positions at universities and colleges, and so far as we can tell, most well-qualified applicants find suitable academic employment ... "

JWE: This is a good hedge. As far as we can tell? Suitable? What does "suitable" mean? I'd also like to know what you mean by "well-qualified"? How many four-page publications does the graduate student need to serve as sixth author? Now I will grant you this. A school's name recognition plays a tie-breaking role in sifting through applicants with similar numbers and credentials (especially when we're talking about a throng of applicants to graduate programs with similar GPAs and GREs). If the University of Minnesota has the right reputation, or at least an obvious place on the map, students can piggyback off recommendations from their advisors much better than the same factory product / unknown quantity from Stockton State College.