Return on an Educational Investment (Practice MANAGEMENT‪)‬

Everyone with a graduate degree has invested money, time, and energy to obtain the degree(s) necessary for taking a licensing board examination. Did your investment pay significant dividends, marginal dividends, or no dividends? Consider the money and time (tuition, classroom instruction, research time, travel and lodging expenses, books, alternative costs of studying vs. spending time with the family) spent on a graduate program over 4-5, maybe 6 years. If that money was placed into a bank or a real estate investment instead of a graduate degree, would the turnaround time for a payback on your investment be quicker than the job you started after graduation? If you considered the time alone and had stayed in a job for that same amount of time, would you have accumulated retirement benefits or/and earned a job promotion during that time? Asking these questions may prevent an expensive reaction--in other words, doing "due diligence" or making every effort to avoid harm to yourself and your company. Taking the recent listing of salaries and job data from Susan Ireland's Web site, the median salary range for clinical psychologists in metropolitan communities is between $61,000 and $70,000. The highest numbers were in California, where the cost of living ranks at the top with New York. In Arkansas, the median range runs from $54,000 to $60,000. In Colorado, the range runs from $69,000 to $93,000. In Florida, it runs from $58,000 to $91,000. In Nebraska, it runs $52,000 to $58,000, and in Oklahoma it is $46,000 to $56,000. In Texas, it is $50,000 to $67,000 (Ireland, 2010). If you were working at a master's level making $40,000, is the money spent on a doctorate worth the extra $10,000 to $30,000 per year? If you have a student loan for $80,000 to $100,000 to be paid out over five years, payments could run $20,000 annually. Was the return worth the 4-6 years of hard work and reduced income for basically a 10% salary increase, if, in fact, there was a significant difference?