In 2013, two former interns at publishing company Conde Nast filed suit demanding back wages and attorney fees. Their lawsuit came on the heels of two other successful lawsuits demanding that interns actually get paid for their work: A federal district court sided with the interns who sued Fox Searchlight Pictures, saying the interns should have been paid for their work on the film “Black Swan.” And the year before, Charlie Rose and his production company agreed to pay up to $250,000 to more than 150 former interns to settle a class-action suit.
mft salaries
Salaries in mental health are improving
If you’re considering a career in mental health, there’s some good news on the economic front. After stagnation associated with the larger economy’s downturn, salaries in mental health professions appear to be back on the rise.
Source data: Bureau of Labor Statistics Note that the y-axis there starts at $40k, so it’s a little misleading as to proportionality but shows year-over-year changes more clearly. The news seems to be especially good for MFTs in California (I’m one of them, so I’m incredibly biased on this): From 2012 to 2013, the mean annual wage for MFTs here went from $47,230 to $54,470. That’s an increase of more than 15% in just a year. As I said, some pesky cautionary notes: First, the BLS data assumes full-time work, calculating the average annual wage by multiplying the mean hourly wage by 2,080. There are benefits and drawbacks to that approach; it keeps the mean from being dragged down by part-time workers, but also arguably overestimates what the average worker actually makes, since many do work part-time. Second, there is significant state-by-state variability in the numbers. Even if the national means are improving, it can be worth checking to see what the trend is within your state. Third, especially in states with smaller populations of mental health professionals, it isn’t unusual to see big gains or drops in a year simply due to small sample sizes. Data for larger states is more reliable. Finally, the BLS data isn’t perfectly broken down by license; the data shown here uses the BLS categories of Mental Health Counselors (21-1014); Clinical, Counseling, and School Psychologists (19-3031); Marriage and Family Therapists (21-1013); and Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers (21-1023). These are the categories most focused on mental health services and thus the closest parallels to licensure. There should be a new data set for 2014 out within a couple of months; I’ll update this post once that data is available. # # # Your comments here are welcome. You can post them in the comments below, by email to ben[at]bencaldwell[dot]com, or on my Twitter feed.
No, counseling psychology is not a terrible major in college
Of course salary numbers in mental health look bad when you leave out people with the graduate degrees necessary to practice.
NPR ran a story last month punctuated by a graph of the highest- and lowest-earning college majors. The worst on the list, by far, was Counseling Psychology. Those who majored in Counseling Psych brought in a median income of under $30,000 per year.
No one gets into mental health care for the money, but the numbers were a black eye for the Counseling field — the American Counseling Association has even responded by commissioning its own study of salaries among its members.
But there was a big problem with that original chart, one that the researchers themselves had noted but which was often ignored in discussions of their findings: It didn’t include people with graduate degrees.
In just about any mental health field, you need at least a master’s degree to practice. Those who don’t take that extra step are often limited to very basic, entry-level jobs with little hope for advancement.
So NPR is back this week with another chart, one that includes graduate-degree earners. And Counseling Psychology no longer shows up on the list of the 10 lowest-earning undergraduate majors. Counseling Psych majors get a big bump in median incomes when you include those who go on to advanced degrees, as should be expected.
Notably, social work stayed in the bottom 10, even when those who get their graduate degrees are included. Their median incomes went from just under $40,000 a year (with graduate degree earners excluded) to about $45,000 a year (with graduate degree earners included).
It’s hard to place family therapy here, since MFTs come from a wide variety of undergraduate majors, most commonly (but by no means exclusively) psychology or family studies. For MFT salary data, the best place to start is this Bureau of Labor Statistics page.
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Your comments are welcome. You can post them in the comments below, by email to ben[at]bencaldwell[dot]com, or on my Twitter feed.