Fascinating Discussion of PsyD vs PhD and other Online Issues

This is not my thing but I've been through more than a few of these discussions. As I understand it, only 19 states require APA accreditation for licensure so for the majority of people this is a non-issue. Also, that whole "you can't work for the VA" thing seems pretty lame. I just don't hear anything about people falling all over themselves to work for the VA.

 

There are so many variables. For a twenty something year old with no family responsibilities, a residential APA accredited program and APA accredited internship. This will maximize potential. Many advertised positions want or prefer APA accredited degree and internship.

the other hand, if you are a middle-aged person in your 40s or 50s with family responsibilities looking to go into private practice as a Clinical Psychologist, that route may not make sense. Fielding and Alliant may not make sense either due to cost and perception issues. California Southern at 20 some thousand dollars may make perfect sense.

 

There are so many variables. For a twenty something year old with no family responsibilities, a residential APA accredited program and APA accredited internship may be the best choice. This will maximize potential. Many advertised positions want or prefer APA accredited degree and internship.

On the other hand, if you are a middle-aged person in your 40s or 50s with family responsibilities looking to go into private practice as a Clinical Psychologist, that route may not make sense. Fielding and Alliant may not make sense either due to cost and perception issues (low return on investment). California Southern at 20 some thousand dollars may be the best choice. I knew a Clinical Psychologist who graduated from a very good APA program and APA internship. He worked in private practice. Could have worked next door to a Walden grad or now Cal Southern grad.

Whether where you graduated from impacts you in terms of national listing or provider panels I do not know. I seem to vaguely recall the Clinical Psych telling me something about a registry that only took APA grads??

 

The vast majority of insurances will accept licensed Master degree providers so it's hard to imagine that anyone is going to quibble over whether your PhD/PsyD is APA accredited.

 

First, let me apologize for a statistic I got wrong. I was under the impression more than one third of the psychologists in the US worked in a VA setting. It's actually a very small amount:

Big growth in the number of VA psychologists

Every potential employer matters, but a little over five is not even close to 33. The VA benefits, and potential salary are great, but there are many options. The internship crisis still leads me to believe programmatic accreditation is important, however.

 

Just for reference, here is a job posting for a clinical psychologist at the VA:

Sure, I can see wanting to work at a VA for some people. If I saw an HR gig at a VA Hospital, the pay was comparable to what I make now and I qualified for the job I would probably apply. That might be for no other reason than the fact that I wouldn't mind having my military service actually count toward retirement (though, another 7 years at my present job would have be fully vested in our defined benefit pension system, so I'd have to weight the pros and cons).

But the VA isn't the FBI. There aren't grade school kids hoping to one day work at the VA because they dream of working in largely dilapidated facilities, using outdated computer systems and propping up a system that, in my opinion, has failed its primary constituency in virtually every imaginable way.

Well, maybe there are. But those would be some messed up kids holding onto a bitterness that I really wouldn't understand.

I really don't believe in accreditation shopping. I think, on some levels, it makes sense. If you are looking for a good two year college and hope to continue your education, picking an RA school is going to yield more favorable results than an NA school, generally speaking.

Beyond that, if you are an 18-20 year old looking for a school, accreditation should be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.

The University of Phoenix and Cornell are both regionally accredited. Which one is going to confer a more valuable MBA (generally speaking)? Reputation matters. But I'm talking about real reputation. I think that USNWR regional rankings are crap, personally, for that reason. A hiring manager in California doesn't care that your tiny liberal arts college in Montana is ranked number 36 in Northern Region of the Midwest for private, non-profit liberal arts colleges that have names beginning with vowels.

They heard of the school or they didn't. The school has a positive reputation, no reputation or a bad reputation. Those perceptions can, and do, shift as your geography changes. But those are the simple realities for how your degree is going to be viewed.

If you want to be a psychologist, an architect, a lawyer, a doctor (etc.) you should be shooting for a school with a solid reputation. That reputation needs to be relevant to your goals. You need to be reasonably sure that the program you are choosing is going to help you achieve your goals.

If you are looking at top psychology programs, odds are you are looking at APA accredited programs. You may choose a non-APA program, of course. This is particularly the case if the top shelf schools are off limits to you for any (including financial) reason.

If your goal is to be licensed in Hawaii, your school needs to qualify you for licensure in Hawaii first and foremost. It doesn't matter if the program is licensure qualifying in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and every state on the East Coast down to Florida. You need a program that qualifies you to work in Hawaii. If your program will also meet the requirements of another state, call it a bonus. But your first mission is to find a program that meets the requirements of Hawaii.

I think that some people feel that the best answer is the program that gives them the most universal application. That's fine. But it isn't necessarily the best approach.

Funny anecdote, my wife and I hired this babysitter when our first child was born. She was a student at Syracuse and she really wanted to become a lawyer. When she departed our employment she told us she was going to GWU Law. But a few months later she told us she signed onto a joint Canadian/American JD program (four year) that would qualify her for the bar in all U.S. states and Ontario.

Oh, cool, was she from Ontario? Nope. Wanted to work in Ontario? Nah. Ever been to Ontario? Well, she went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls once.

So she spent an extra year for something she will likely never use. Why? Because it's a one-up on probably 99% of U.S. lawyers, she can work in Canada and they can't (at least, as easily). Part of me thinks it was clever. Part of me thinks it was an asinine waste of time and money.

If you live in California, never intend to leave the state and want to become a psychologist I think you should shoot for the school with the best reputation in the state. But if you're making a career transition and it's the choice between California Southern University and not making a career transition, go with CSU (may warguns forgive me).

Different life stages see different objectives. And, at these various stages, we weigh success in very different ways. The 25 year old MBA might view success as a $100k salary while the 55 year old recent MBA grad is simply thrilled to break through that $50k ceiling that held them back. Neither is wrong. They are just different.

Maybe a recent college grad should only look at APA programs (because they should probably be looking at the top). But there is plenty of utility in programs that lack certain programmatic accreditations. Capella grads do go on to get licensed. That doesn't mean it's the best program. That doesn't mean it's a good program. But, for a lot of people, it's the only way they were ever going to achieve a goal of becoming a licensed psychologist and that's OK too.

 

The National Register of Health Service Psychologists requires APA/ASPPB. Who uses that register or what worth being listed is....I don't know.

Again, there are so many factors to consider such as your age, family situation and intended use that may not make the most prestigious program the most viable or cost effective for you.

Someone posted on one of these boards that his wife decided to become a Clinical Psychologist. She looked at Fielding but decided the debt was crippling. So, she chose an unaccredited California Psy Board qualifying program at a fraction of the cost and was happily in private practice (she lived in CA).

 

http://programdata.laureate.net/walden/phd-in-psychology.htmlSome data from Walden (non APA) about cost, student loan debt load and completion within time frames:

 

Great posts. ASPPB has reciprocity agreements in many cases as well. I somewhat went the path you mentioned with my degrees. They are all regionally accredited, but do include alternative means of acquiring credit including CBEs, small amounts of tuition assistance, and using personal funds. Because of this approach, I don't have any student debt. I don't have any research experience either, but I would likely become a competitive candidate if I did.

 

It's normal for doctoral programs to have less than 20 people in a cohort. If only a couple of people out of a cohort are matching when a higher percentage of people are matching in other programs, then it is a cause for concern. Even if you're discounting for people who don't want to become licensed, you still have to look at the matching rates for accredited internships. If you live in an area where employers don't care about APA accredited internships, then I guess you'll be fine. You just won't be able to get a job with the largest employer of mental health professionals, the federal government. You can also open up your own practice, but there seems to be saturation in that market.

 

It could be a cause for concern. Or it could be an indicator of something completely benign. Because Capella doesn't have a terrible match rate compared to some other more established schools. Is that because Capella is better? Maybe. But we don't know the reason why the people in a program weren't matched. It may have had nothing whatsoever to do with their program, their preparation or anything else. Maybe they are just abrasive jerks who are academically flawless. In that case, all the rate would prove is that some schools are better at weeding out abrasive jerks than others.

Well, no, you don't have to look at matching rates. We went through this same argument over degree program ROI. It's a metric. And it can be a useful metric. But it isn't an all-encompassing metric that tells us good from bad.

And yes, I get that the typical cohort is less than 20 people, my point is that when you are dealing with very small groups it is very difficult to gather any meaningful conclusion from it. If you have a cohort of 117 people and someone in it dies in a tragic car accident, your numbers are largely unaffected. If you are in a cohort of 2, you just took your school's match rate from 100% to 50%. That's one of the reasons why year-over-year data is provided. If no more than 30% of the graduates place for three consecutive years then, well, maybe you have to start wondering why.

But I would imagine that schools that have their own accredited internships have a decided advantage over schools that do not. Even still, if School A matches more graduates than School B, it doesn't really matter if School A having its own internship program matters. What matters is that you, theoretically, have a better shot at an internship at School A.

But, and this is the point I have been making in every post in this thread, that doesn't prove that School B's graduates are ill-prepared, unprofessional or unsuitable for the profession. The match rate simply does not give you that information.

 

Sanantone,

You are correct that the market for private practice is something to take into account. I don't know the current market. The federal statistics for predicted job growth show LPCs to have a much higher growth rate than is predicted for Psychologists. LPCs can be Masters or Doctoral level practitioners. It can be quite easy for someone to enroll in an expensive for profit program and leave saddled with a lot of debt only to discover that LPC salaries are generally much lower than a Psychologists.

I think LPCs and their Clinical Social Work equivalents are less expensive for insurance companies. In most states, the only thing an LPC cannot do that a Psychologist can is projective testing.(Rorschach, etc). With much lower average salaries than Psychologists, you don't necessarily want to be 100 thousand in student loan debt because you were dying to get a doctorate in counseling.

 

I have met people in a number of fields in that last category. They look like normal people until they start talking about their student loan debt. At that point the blood drains from their face. They have gone for degree after degree from for-profits dug a huge hole, could not fully pay and then owe well into six figures. They were in ordinary jobs with no hope of repayment. One told me that eventual death was his repayment plan.

 

My best friend racked up six figures worth of debt on his B.S. in Accounting at King's College (wilkes-barre).

My debt load upon graduation was just shy of $20k with around half of that being owed to the University of Scranton for my A.A.

My wife was able to stop the bleeding under the six figure range (but still over $50k) for her masters in counseling. And she never even looked at a for-profit school.

Tuition rates are posted on websites. You can tuition shop for education. Most people don't. The loans are available and people don't really consider ROI.

 

Out-of-pocket costs (minus employer reimbursement, scholarships & tuition reductions):
AA - Free (courtesy of California's hemorrhaging taxpayer rolls)
BS - $12,000
MA- $1700
MPA - $6600
DBA - $10,500

Total - $30,800

ROI - Totally Blessed!

 

Must be a nice feeling Dr. Me Again!

This (expense) is an area where I can see nationally accredited degrees meeting a need. If you need to do distance learning (or a combination in the case of the former Tennessee Temple University Ph.D.), want to study at the doctoral or masters level (increase knowledge), and earn an accredited Masters or Doctorate and do not intend to enter traditional academia.....why go into debt six figures at places like Walden? For many people attending there is probably no thought of a full time academic career due to the fact they are attending a Regionally Accredited non traditional/for profit school or their age is making that career choice less likely.

Many people simply want an accredited degree and knowledge commensurate with the degree level. Would the $16,000 Tennessee Temple U Ph.D. or $13,000 DBA from a Nationally Accredited school serve them as well without impoverishing them.

I think Neuhaus is correct that many people do not do an analysis. They want that Masters degree or Doctorate and sign up. Maybe the for profits look easier, maybe their marketing and making the loan process easier is appealing but they get down the road and sometimes find the return on investment not quite what they expected.

 

That's why they have three statistics: percent matched, percent not matched, and percent withdrawn.

 

When I applied to college they heavily emphasized that I was applying. I wasn't "signing up." There was, at the very least, a perception that a bunch of people weren't going to get in. It was worse when my parents went to college. So, a lot of people grew up around this notion that they might not be good enough to even get in to a college or a degree program.

All of the sudden, UofP comes onto the scene offering the exact same product that TESC, ESC, Excelsior and many others have been offering for a very long time. But UofP is out there marketing it. Requested information? They follow it up with (too many) phone calls. So a lot of people went from universities effectively ignoring them and telling them they may not be good enough to schools beating you over the head to "apply" with acceptance pretty much guaranteed.

I can't fault some people for signing up without fully thinking it through. I have a set of encyclopedias for the same reason. Mine was a less costly mistake than a PhD, however.

I also think that there are many more people who are willing to impulsively sign up for a program at a school like Walden out of a desire to be called "doctor" more than an earnest desire to engage in scholarly research. For those people, an NA program (or, better yet, therapeutic intervention to keep them from trying to throw money at their feeling of inadequacy) might be a solid option. If my goal was to be called "doctor" before I die and I didn't care about the utility of my degree at all, sure, I'd probably sign up for the DBA program at the University of Management and Technology or Apollos or insert any NA school here. I could also just get a purely religious degree from an unaccredited school. Or, I could just start circling the little "Dr." When I sign up for stuff. Even easier and cheaper.

 

And none of those three rates tell us that a school's graduates are ill-prepared, unprofessional or unsuitable for the profession. I can type it again if you're still confused.

 

I'm not confused, you are. If someone is too ill to start an internship or has to withdraw from the matching system for some reason, he or she is separated from the percent not matched category. This was in reference to you bringing up someone dying in a car crash.