To the editor:
A recent article arguing that graduate education in psychology does not pay off financially, “Graduate School Pays Off for Pharmacists, but Not Psychologists,” presents a flawed picture of both psychology as a field and the careers it leads to. By treating psychology as a single, uniform pathway and relying on incomplete measures of earnings, the article risks giving prospective students a misleading impression of their options and long-term outcomes.
Not to mention that the article makes claims about psychologists without actually including psychologists in its analysis.
Despite the headline, the study cited excludes people trained at the doctoral level, even though doctoral training is required to be a psychologist. This omission is consequential. Employer-posted salary data from January 2023 through January 2026 show clear earnings growth as individuals advance through graduate training, with the largest increases occurring at the transition from master’s- to doctoral-level education. Over the course of a career, those differences can amount to several hundred thousand dollars in additional earnings.
Psychology is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in the United States because it helps students understand how people think, learn, work and interact. Graduates apply this knowledge across health care, education, technology, business, public safety and public policy. Students are not blind to financial realities, but they are often motivated by a mix of purpose, flexibility and opportunity. Framing graduate education in psychology as a simple question of whether it “pays off” fails to reflect how students actually make decisions or how careers in psychology develop over time.
A more useful approach is to examine which psychology degrees offer value, in which settings and over what time horizon. This distinction matters because early-career earnings capture a period when many psychology graduates, particularly in clinical pathways, are still completing required supervised practice and are not yet earning at levels associated with independent licensure. Evaluating psychology through a narrow early-earnings snapshot misses how professional training unfolds.
The article also treats psychology as a single category, masking the diversity of careers within the field. Psychology includes health service and school psychologists, industrial-organizational psychologists, human factors specialists, quantitative researchers, and professionals working in education, policy and technology. These pathways differ substantially in training requirements, job markets and compensation. Grouping a limited set of master’s-level programs under a single label obscures these differences and limits students’ ability to understand where specific opportunities exist.
Graduate education in psychology does not lead to a single outcome, and its value cannot be judged through a narrow earnings comparison. When students are given a clearer and more complete picture of psychology’s many pathways and long-term prospects, graduate training in the field remains both meaningful and economically viable.
Arthur C. Evans, Jr., Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice President
American Psychological Association
