Psychology Degrees Give a Whole New Meaning to Psychology

Psychology is woven into daily life now in a way it never used to be. Maybe that has it backwards. Maybe it's the shape of modern society, the pace and pressure of how we live, that pushed the subject into the spotlight in the first place. An old episode of The Twilight Zone puts the idea in sharp relief. In it, an elderly man believes his life is tethered to a grandfather clock built on the day he was born. The clock gets wound every two days, and he's convinced that when it stops, so does he. His granddaughter, who lives with him and is nearly at her wit's end over the fixation, sends him to a psychiatrist. During their conversation, the old man says something that stuck with me: if people didn't have relationship problems, psychiatrists wouldn't have jobs.

That remark lands differently when you think about psychology degrees. If we weren't such a tangled-up culture, nobody would need the training to help sort us out.

But we are tangled up, and that training matters. You need one of the recognized psychology degrees to practice, to administer treatment and care, to work in a clinical setting, or to prescribe medication. Reports from this century point to something else, though. A psychology credential doesn't lock you into one path. Not everyone who earns a psych diploma ends up as a clinician or a psychiatric physician. And to be fair about it, not everyone wants to.

If you're among the many who put in the work for a psychology degree only to hear that it, like English or philosophy, qualifies you for teaching or waiting tables and little else, don't take that to heart. These degrees carry far more than most people realize. Psych majors and graduates are useful in any arena where human beings cooperate, mix, or go up against each other. With a B.A. in psychology, you could look toward law, where everyone from children caught in custody battles to people entangled in domestic abuse or criminal proceedings needs someone who understands the mind.

You could bring the degree into a hospital, a school, or a retirement home, places where people genuinely need you. Or you could step into marketing. Think about the psychology behind buying and selling, the elbowing between rival products and services, and how much you'd be worth in every corner of it, from reading demographics to shaping design.

Or, as The Labor Bureau and CNN New York's Shelley Schwartz have pointed out, you might carry those skills into accounting, auditing, insurance, or any of the countless business settings where executives, administrators, and mid-level managers quietly list psychology degrees on their resumes.

So the places that need you aren't only the ones where psychological conflict or distress plainly shows up. They're the places where people work, buy, sell, think, and feel. Which is nearly everywhere you look.