The Most frequently Asked Question:
What Can I Do With A Psychology Degree?
As faculty we often are asked this question by anyone from prospective students and majors to parents. We provide two possible answers below.
What Can I Do With A Psychology Degree?
Rather than answer what you can do, we can tell you what our majors actually do.
Many of our majors go on in psychology or related fields; the others go into a variety of occupations and graduate programs, including business, medicine, and law. Some graduates eventually acquire a doctoral degree in psychology. According to statistics derived from the National Center for Educational Statistics database, Union College ranked 15th among its 32 highly competitive peer institutions for number of Ph.D’s produced during the last decade (ending in 2001). In addition, a fairly large number of students pursue masters-level degrees in psychology and related areas such as speech pathology, social work, and education. Of the 202 students graduating from 1998-2004 for whom we have records, 60% went on to earn a masters degree or higher. Of those not going on to graduate school, 36% went straight into psychology- related employment, most in human services, health fields, or research, 34% entered a business-oriented profession (e.g., sales, management, banking), 15% worked in an educational setting (e.g., pre-school or private school teacher, college admissions counselor), and 6% became event planners or program coordinators.
What Can I Do With A Psychology Degree?
It's not about the major, it's about the intellectual skills.
As written in the opening paragraph of the Psychology Department's Mission Statement, "the fundamental educational goal of the Psychology Department is to help students develop the intellectual skills which are at the center of all liberal education: a) the capacity to think deeply, critically, logically, complexly, and ethically, b) the ability to evaluate claims to truth and to make educated, defensible judgments under conditions of uncertainty and complexity, c) the capacity to use information resources and to learn new information independently, and d) the ability to express one’s thoughts in writing and speech." These are core skills that will stay with you throughout your life, and that are valued by employers, regardless of the setting. If you've ever wondered why the Psychology major requires specific courses (e.g., statistics and core-area courses) and specific types of courses (e.g., seminars and labs), one reason is to ensure that all of our majors graduate with this core set of intellectual abilities.