The group is described as follows: "a listserv of doctoral-level psychologists, post-docs, and interns who have interest in issues related to value and money in psychology and mental health. The group was developed in response to an energetic discussion on the APPIC postdoc list in spring of 2001 as people grappled with their inability to pay off student loans. We will explore ways to increase the value of psychology and psychologists."

Psychology Careers Hurdle 1: Getting into Graduate School

The first hurdle, achieving admission to a Ph.D. program, is fraught with hidden odds & obstacles, not the least of which is competition from 80 to 680 applicants for anywhere between 2 and 5 positions. (A clinical Ph.D. program at a reputable or popular university in sunny California or snowy Colorado during an economic downturn can draw upwards of 700 applications). While 67% of Baccalaureate Recipients expressed plans to pursue advanced degrees in Psychology, the data support my contention that the odds of achieving admission to graduate school in Psychology are slim (approximately 18% of Baccalaureate Recipients end up enrolled in a graduate program full-time, and of these who are enrolled, 61% are pursuing advanced degrees other than psychology [US Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Office of Educational Research and Improvement [NCES 98-071]). And when we break it down by level of study, the vast majority are admitted to masters rather than doctoral level programs. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report based on a review of 1997 data revealed that 67% of all persons with a BA or BS in a social science were required to accept positions outside their field of study, compared to only 18% for all persons with a BA or BS in a health or life-related field of study. For additional information on the odds and obstacles to graduate school and on strategy and tactics for achieving admission, see the special feature Applying to Psychology Graduate School.

Psychology Careers Hurdle 2: Surviving Graduate School in Psychology

Most psychology majors are unaware that in the vast majority of doctoral programs a "C" in a graduate course results in academic probation. (I am familiar with one program in which a B- results in your referral to a faculty committee hearing). Now for the more frightening news. I know many students with a near-perfect academic performance in graduate school who were placed on conduct probation for what amounts to deviation from some social norm. Graduate faculty reserve various categories of conduct probation for ill-fitting students who cannot be criticized on academic grounds. Grounds for probation may include the perception that a student's inattention to detail signals an unwillingness to openly celebrate Psychology. You may be in trouble if you don't...attend nearly all faculty social functions, voluntary colloquia, or join extracurricular research teams in the hopes of becoming the sixth author on as many four page publications as possible. Remember, you are playing a zero sum game. Psych profs in every graduate program around the country can fail out half their graduate student body and still receive over 100 bids from newly minted PhDs to fill their next tenure-track opening. They can afford to cherry-pick. They can afford to use their graduate training programs to clone themselves and socialize students into a culture of standard bearers, ambassadors, and administrative savants. In a search for suitable apprentices or 'junior colleagues,' they will demonize and disqualify persons considerably less eccentric than some of the personalities fired by Donald Trump on his reality television series. The habit of highly effective graduate students who survive the microscope of faculty attention, who find their papers in order at each characterological-block checkpoint, and who actually go on to claim the ultimate prize of tenure-track employment, is the dog-eat-dog understanding that they are competing with one another. As a graduate student, I furrowed my brows in the general direction of some of my cohorts who, to my dismay, treated the psychology department like a coliseum of gladiatorial carnage. How competitive could graduate school be when the distribution of grades among all the overachieving grad students was skewed toward the A range? Academic performance was not really being used to separate the men from the boys, so with naivety falling from my eyes, I gazed upon my fellow students with this "it's all good" expression on my face when I should have realized that non-academic (i.e. social) considerations (i.e. so-called 'standards') were being secretly applied to size us up. Just how were we competing? Think of it as a modeling contest. The losing students were those who 'costumed up' least, who less-than slavishly imitated the behaviors of their professors and the stylistic elements of research and teaching (i.e. epistemology). The students who would have been voted by the graduate program yearbook committee (if there were one) least congenital incarnation of conventional wisdom and practice (what psych profs like to call 'standards'). No one should really be surprised by this. This method of evaluating students bares a striking resemblance to conventional elements of their research projects with their aggregate statistics, their normative standard scores, and their penchant for controlling within-subjects variance (also known as "error"). As a graduate student, every slip is itemized and reported as part of their end-of-academic-term accounting session:

• Unlike fellow students, you defer your graduate research design for the following Spring in favor of a seminar on Peter Berger's The Homeless Mind offered by your thesis advisor. Sure, there may have no rule that all students must take Experimental Methods in their first year, and sure your thesis advisor may have approved your course selection decision, but every other student leaped at the first opportunity to take the Experimental Methods course and so questions abound: "Why didn't you?"
  

• You let it slip during student orientation that you are enamored with the works of Swiss psychiatrist CG Jung, in the company of behaviorists and theory-hating positivists who spend their entire careers assigning 'variables' to the x and y axis of ANOVA tables.
  

• After the department head announces attendance at weekly colloquia are not mandatory, you decide to skip a few weeks of uninteresting presentations to analyze data for your thesis or grade papers in fulfillment of your responsibilities as teaching assistant.
  

At the end of each academic period, defined as either a trimester, semester, or year, the student's case is discussed by a student ethics & evaluation committee comprised of program faculty, where inferences are violently drawn about a student's attitude and character. A characterological assessment bordering on character assassination ensues, masquerading as normal performance evaluation. The whole process amounts to slander in that professors who are not yet familiar with the student are given certain expectations and possibly even the responsibility of assessing student responsiveness and improvement in future coursework/assistantship assignments. Students funded through a research or teaching assistantship are vulnerable to aggressive evaluation by the faculty member to whom they are assigned. In short, it is just as important to demonstrate a proactive enthusiasm and embodiment of the department or professional epistemology as it is to receive excellent grades. The designation of attendance at colloquia as non-mandatory or suggested is often a trap to test a student's commitment to department affairs and in broader psychology beyond his or her own area of interest. The equivocation of guidelines is also often a trap to identify students who do not seek out faculty expectations or who may be eager to presume latitude. For additional categories of vulnerability, consult the Ehrenfels interview titled Student Ethics & Evaluation: The Committees and the companion document Surviving Graduate School in Psychology. But beware! Academics are more than willing to hand out a masters degree as a door prize.

You are being compared with other students with respect to how much energy and initiative you put forth to learn the faculty's unwritten rules and expectations. You are being judged on your intrinsic interest in the field's standard operating procedures and, where a requirement is ill-defined, your interest in seeking out faculty for instructions. A habit of assuming latitude in a normatively ambigious situation often spells career death to graduate students.

Psychology Careers Hurdle 3: Building a Competitive Vita

And it gets worse! Those who do make it into a doctoral program and survive indoctrination to receive a PhD (usually after considerably more than 4 years), end up facing even worse odds of finding employment suitable to their education (i.e., assistant professorship). While the requirements for a doctorate in psychology are correctly estimated at 4-5 years in most department handbooks, it takes considerably more than 4 years, and in some cases upwards of 10 years, to build a vitae (i.e., resume) that will allow a student to compete for a university position following conferment of the PhD. Students often postpone or water down their doctoral candidacy exam or dissertation to teach sections of undergraduate classes, to sign on as the sixth member of a research team that may one day yield a four-page publication, or to travel the country in search of workshops and conferences to add to one's dossier. Research assistants are slaves to the whims of their mentors (on whom they depend for their funding and letter of recommendation); it is not uncommon for an assistant to be swallowed whole by the paranoia or perfectionism surrounding the mentor's next publication. The pursuit of the PhD may be complicated by other factors as well, as in cases where it is incumbent on a candidate, in planning his own dissertation project, to conform or capitulate to the preferences of an advisor or mentor on everything from research design to topic! This incumbency may be real, quasi-real, imagined, or dictated by the fact the student has no innate interests of his or her own.

Graduate students brawl for an unassigned section of General Psychology and it is almost invariably assigned to the student who has the most teaching experience, resulting in wide discrepancy between students who have taught 5-6 courses and students who have taught 0-2 courses. I remember being quite irritated by the prospect of postponing graduation beyond my fourth (or even fifth year) until students in their 8th year could decide they've had enough of graduate school -- or enough teaching experience -- to vacate the premises.

Psychology Careers Hurdle 4a: Research Doctors Compete for the Tenure-Track Position

After conferment of the PhD, and assuming a competitive vita, the new doctor of psychology still faces an uphill battle for a career. And the competition for a tenure-track assistant professorship is even more daunting than the competition for admission to graduate school, because he or she will be competing for only one available position. Hundreds of doctors roam the country like the walking dead stringing together a series of fixed-term (usually one-year) "instructor" positions or else stringing together a collection of one-course adjunct assignments across multiple universities in the tri-state area (Tuesday here, Wednesday there), often while working a part-time job to make a living, all the while hoping that some department head will like him or her enough to keep him or her in mind for the next tenure-track opening. Again, more often than not, he or she is not the only adjunct instructor at this university. Approximately 50 percent of all courses are taught by adjunct instructors, who may comprise more than 50 percent of a university's faculty. At $2,000-$2,500 a course, universities meet criteria for sweat shops!

Psychology Careers Hurdle 4b: Aspiring Practitioners Compete for Required Practical Experiences

Students in clinical PhD programs feel like they are never done applying. Twice they compete with each other (and students from other local schools) for a one-year practicum placement at a local institution like a clinic, hospital, or counseling center ("externship") and then ultimately compete with students nationwide for their capstone practical experience, the "internship." Students unfortunate enough to have to settle for an internship that is not accredited by the APA have to demonstrate equivalence to qualify to register for the licensing exam, and even after licensure are often disqualified by many institutions that require, even given other superior credentials, that oft-arbitrary or petty APA seal of approval. As a whole, the Veterans Administration will not permit a licensed doctor of clinical psychology to work at any of its hospitals if the internship experience was not accredited by the APA. Moreover, even with an accredited internship, the aspiring clinician must complete after conferment of the doctorate so many hours of supervised therapy (usually 2-years worth) as a prerequisite to the licensing examination. This amounts to what? You got it! More applications. More changes in residence. More scrutiny, vulnerability, and impression management! More importantly, new doctors are finding that they are designated as 'pre-license' and thus disqualified for many permanent positions for which they apply and are forced to restrict their applications to one-year fixed term or post-doc positions. Therefore, it would appear that an additional step or stage has been added to the already protracted and inflated process of professional development. Recently, I observed a friend's journey through the post-doctoral search for permanent employment. Everyone she applied, despite three years of pre-intern practical experience and one internship, she was turned away in favor of someone with "more experience." I have come to despise the mindless and convenient deployment of this bloated criterion, which should be evaluated within a framework of criteria such as intelligence, clinical acumen/insight, education, resourcefulness, loyalty, rapport, maturity, and initiative -- qualities that provide clues to an applicant's growth potential and learning curve. Experience alone is a mere QUANtitative variable. It seems almost every applicant is just a stone's throw away from the experience accrued by the most experienced candidate. Moreover, what is the difference between 3,000 and 4,000 hours of clinical experience? Might there be diminishing returns, a point beyond which 'more experience' fails to pay dividends in increased knowledge or growth. Has experience become a quick-and-dirty means of selecting an applicant by committees that are out of ideas or that do not wish to take the time to examine the course history of the applicants? My friend, for example, for her second doctorate in psychology, enrolled in a program that required 23 assessment and therapy courses, most of which included a clinical competency examination. In my opinion, this may more-than-compensate for any difference in experience between her and the leading candidate.

Within this climate of training, credentialing, and selection, experience and maturity become increasingly distinct constructs. I am beginning to see professionals with a cache of experience but with little maturity, lacking perhaps the time, intelligence, or motivation to subject the experiences to the kind of integrative contemplation and reflection that builds lasting and generalizable knowledge. As this trend becomes more obvious to more employers, some employers will demand yet more experience in the form of a diverse portfolio of highly specialized experiences, while others by contrast will demand more years of the same routinized experience. Until employers can learn to think in a language other than experience, measure in units other than experience, we will be trapped in this vicious cycle and add to the professional development onion thin layers with no nutritional value (i.e., a second post-doc?).

Psychology Careers Hurdle 5: The Post-Doc

Unlike med school graduates, newly christened PhDs (or PsyDs) in Clinical Psychology enter into a period of limbo known as post-doctoral residency, during which they accumulate a number of supervised hours (while preparing to sit for the EPPP ["E Triple P"]) required by the state board for licensure. Applying for jobs as a "pre-licensed doctorate" is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of doctorates in the market increases. The new PhD or PsyD may be reduced to begging for low-pay or volunteer positions at an institution where a licensed psychologist is willing to accept responsibility for supervision of a pre-licensed co-worker. The "E Triple P" is no gimme, not even for the person with dual doctorates (a research PhD and a clinical PsyD), as a review of this exam revealed questions that require familiarity with individual research studies not likely to have been covered in one's coursework, questions seeking the "best" of four generally correct answers, and questions whose correct answers conflict with the explanations of correct answers on other practice tests.

Even graduates from doctoral level research programs find they need a "post-doc." Some see the writing on the wall and move almost reflexively to that corner of the APA Monitor classified section, while others, after failing to secure so much as an interview for a tenure-track assistant professorship, scurry last minute to find something to do to keep their CV from derailing, their timeline from breaking, their degree from expiring like a carton of unused milk. Of course, the post-doc presents the new PhD with no new or exotic responsibilities. This is a one-year job defined by responsibilities not unlike those the PhD performed as a graduate student or intern and not unlike those he or she will ultimately perform as a professor or licensed therapist. In many cases, the post-doc amounts to a major waste of time, a bogus stepping stone and purely sociological artifact with no unique or innate value. But what should we expect of a field in which clinical psychology students complain that the internship for which they have to move cross-country represents nothing more advanced than what they did locally for two years of "externships."

Psychology Careers: Hurdles after Tenure/Licensure

Even after a doctor (practitioner) is licensed, he or she is not through. There is still the matter of maintaining that license by enrolling in courses that fulfill so many hours of continuing education credit. Even after a doctor (researcher) wins that hard-to-attain tenure-track assistant professorship (avoiding the stigma and lifestyle associated with the title 'instructor' or 'adjunct'), he or she must spend between four and seven years impressing him- or herself on the tenure review committee. Failing to win tenure is tantamount to automatic dismissal and sends the professor back into the job market with the added stink of having been "passed over." Thus for four-to-seven years after becoming an assistant professor, he or she must endure more scrutiny and vulnerability to win job security and membership in the club.

A Career in Psychology?: No Breathable Air in the Atmosphere of Planet Psychology

Market forces are compelling psychologists to re-define their place within a crowded mental health delivery system. Now that social workers (with vastly less training) underbid them for therapy positions, psychologists have morphed into testing specialists. To avoid being confused with psychometricians and other behavioral health technicians, psychologists lobby for prescription privileges in the hopes of doing to psychiatrists what the social workers have done to them. With their adult psychopathology training (and subsidized research) increasingly driven by the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (published by the American Psychiatric Association), psychologists in training are pursuing a new role in the world as second-rate psychiatrists characterized by inferior medical knowledge (and less knowledge of the psychological "software" than they used to develop in training or reserve congenitally).

The structure, as well as the outcomes, of the training and socialization process reveals the field's priorities. The field values professional standing above all else, and is willing to sacrifice or sell out for professional standing many qualities that are indispensible to the understanding of human nature, including intellectual freedom, personal growth, and even professional potential. It is the shunting of this last quality, potential, which prevents me from accepting as true the claim that the field values 'professional development.' Many students are weeded out of graduate school because they failed to comply with written or unwritten policies in which they have not yet been instructed. Moreover, the notion 'publish or perish' is not so undesirable as long as it applies only to professors. However, the neglected truth about the 'publish or perish' phenomenon is that it also applies to graduate students. While publication is in 99% of the graduate programs NOT a prerequisite for a PhD, it is a hidden prerequisite for an assistant professorship. In my opinion, graduate students are punished for attending to the requirements of the PhD and graduating on time (4 or 5 years instead of the average 7-8). To be competitive for a university position following conferment of the PhD, graduate students often delay progress through the program, in some cases spending years performing research, submitting research, and waiting for a ruling from an editorial review board. This process is protracted by three factors: (1) editorial review boards often take upwards of 6-9 months to respond to an author, (2) editorial review boards are constrained by space limitations to select five or six from among 100-500 submissions [even today in the age of the web], and (3) research authors must observe an unwritten rule that a research article can be submitted to no more than one journal at a time.

Again, this would not be so consequential if candidates for faculty positions were evaluated on the basis of their potential, i.e. 'of what is this applicant capable given the position?' Among those who have never published during graduate school, many are capable of publication given the time and the resources associated with a faculty position. It is unfortunate that candidates are not encouraged to add to their CV a section titled 'proposed programs of research.' It is also unfortunate that search committees do not consider the work performed by the applicant as a graduate student. Graduate students break their backs on master's thesis and dissertations, and yet the quality, quantity, originality, and nature of the work performed in fulfillment of these requirements is not taken into account evaluating the worth, potential, or fit of the candidate.

APA Addresses Ehrenfels-Stoked Skepticism for the Value of Research Psychology PhD in Non-Academic (Non-University) Labor Market