Did you know that an estimated 3.4 million individuals in the United States hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology and that younger psychologists are more racially/ethnically diverse than older ones? The APA Center for Workforce Studies maintains a series of interactive data tools to answer these and other questions about the psychology workforce and education pipeline. Hold your mouse over the graphs and figures, and a box pops up with additional information.
Among other topics, data tools cover:
- Degrees in psychology. Four dashboards display an overview of degrees awarded in psychology and separate dashboards for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in psychology. By default, the separate dashboards show data for all years. Filters can show a single year or range of years. The master’s and doctorate degree dashboards can be filtered by health service psychology or research subfields.
- Workforce demographics. This tool shows trends in gender, age, race/ethnicity, disability status, and select combinations of these characteristics. The workforce demographics tool can show individual years 2000-2016.
- Degree pathways in psychology. This data tool contains one dashboard showing pathways from bachelor’s degrees in psychology and another dashboard showing pathways to doctorates in psychology.
- Salaries in psychology. This tool accompanies the December 2017 Datapoint and shows median salaries by position type, sector, and geographic region. Filters can show salaries by career stage.
- Careers in psychology. This data tool displays an occupation word cloud and employment characteristics by level of highest degree in psychology. A portion of the doctorate results were featured in the May 2018 Datapoint.
The degrees in psychology data tool shows trends in psychology degrees awarded in the past decade. The data show that the number of degrees awarded at all degree levels increased steadily but flattened in the last few academic years. The proportion of degrees awarded to women has been relatively stable, while the proportion of degrees awarded to racial/ethnic minorities has slowly increased.
What about students who do not go to graduate school in psychology?
The Degree Pathways data tool indicates nearly 1 million psychology bachelor’s degree holders go on to graduate school in other fields and about 1.9 million don’t go on to graduate school at all. What do these people do? The Careers in Psychology data tool answers this question for those who go into the workforce. Psychology bachelor’s degree holders work in variety of occupations, such as administrative, management, and service jobs. About 64% believed their jobs are related to psychology.
Interested in citing or sharing the data? The bottom of each data tool has additional technical details and a recommended citation and ions at the bottom right corner allow users to share the data tools, download PDF versions, or view the dashboard full screen. To learn more about how to use the data tools, check out this tutorial.
For more information, please contact cws@apa.org or visit the APA Center for Workforce Studies website.
