The report begins with an accurate assessment of the university labor market:

"People have long predicted that the dismal job market for Ph.D.'s would rebound once the scholars who grabbed all the academic positions in the 1960s began to retire and the baby boomlet started pouring onto campus, pushing up the number of instructors. Well, the demographic boom is here, and the profs are starting to retire, but cash-strapped universities are filling those promised slots with underpaid adjuncts, not new tenure-track professors."

While the article rightfully admits there are, and will not be, positions for PhDs in universities, it implies that the private sector will be able to absorb them: "Still, not all is bleak. Employers outside of academia are increasingly looking for individuals with sophisticated analytic skills, opening up a much wider range of job options than ever before for Ph.D.'s." I find it interesting that Ms. Shea did not refer, not even obliquely, to the facts on the basis of which she is making this claim: "With the growing recognition of the link between behavior and health, psychologists will increasingly be called upon to help patients heal their minds while medical doctors heal their bodies. Often, these practitioners will be crucial members of treatment teams in hospitals, counseling patients on how to cope with invasive surgery or life-altering drugs." As a psychologist, I know that the hospital positions to which the U.S. News & World Report article refers, will be available to only two highly specialized groups of PhDs: (1) clinical psychologists who interned with hospitals; and (2) those whose Ph.D. bares a burgeoning but still rare specialization: 'health psychology.' Moreover, many of these hospital positions can be expected to go to those who traditionally underbid psychologists in the mental health delivery market: social workers. Psychologists have complained for years that social workers, most of whom receive a master's degree after 2 years of coursework and 1 year of practcial experience, have been stealing their jobs.

The Shea report does not even mention the fate of those who receive PhDs in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology, and one has to wonder whether these designations, these areas of specialization, have ever grazed her eyes or ears? She also neglected to mention another disturbing trend, a counterforce if you will, in psychology's ever-tightening labor market: the professional school. The market is being flooded with psychologists receiving a relatively new kind of doctorate in psychology (i.e., the Psy.D.) mass produced at for-profit professional school consortiums. These schools are metastasizing campuses at the rate of cancer, each program admitting 3-7 times the number of students admitted in any given year to a traditional university program. Nevertheless, Shea rings optimistic: "Jessica Kohout of the Washington, D.C.-based American Psychological Association also sees growth for psychologists working in preventive care, guiding patients who aren't ill but whose behavior puts them at risk for lung cancer or AIDS, for example." Whether or not the APA serves as Shea's sole guide to the landscape of future employment in Psychology, Shea needs to stop quoting the American Psychological Association (APA). In a thorough report, Jessica Kohout of the APA would serve best to comment on projections culled from more objective sources. The APA is an advocacy group. Its primary mission is to improve the quality and delivery of mental health services, one means of which, in the view of APA officials, is to expand the role and numbers of psychologists. Growing the market share for psychologists is a primary objective of the APA, which drives the APA to engage in activities that border on marketing and self-promotion, as when it instructed its members to lobby Congress in a budget crunch to protect NIH funding for embattled sex research. The APA thinks it can accomplish its mission by whispering its wishes in the ears of a journalist in the hopes a critical mass of reports about these so-called informed projections will fulfill its own prophecy.

I think the speculation aired in the recent report will do nothing to reduce the ranks of unemployed psychologists. The sooner we acknowledge those odds and obstacles, the sooner we can be prepared to deal with them, and the sooner we can stop selling our students a false destiny.