Frankly, I hear all these woe is me stories but I came from a non funded program ($145,000k ) and I couldn't be happier with my choices. Current combined income is $195k a year (private part time 15 hours a week, full time correctional setting). I am on track to have loans forgiven in five more years. Salaried job provides full comprehensive health benefits and retirement with a pension. I just bought a second home and am renting out my first to build assets (disclosure - I do have a partner that makes in the low 100s as well so that helps).
I live a very comfortable lifestyle. Bottom line most people on this post who are dissatisfied with their income / debt aren't willing to work the 60 hours weeks I do nor are they willing to work jobs that offer various compensation for loan repayment in different forms. I enjoy what I do and while I am definitely grinding, it's satisfying to achieve my financial goals early. By my early 40's I'll be where I want to be with no debt and quite a nice income and will be able to cut back on my side work.
Work hard and sacrifice some of the "I want to only work here or there etc" - play later.
Congrats, it sounds like you have figured out what works for you.
That said, it's really important to consider what the modal outcome is for graduates of unfunded programs and for psychologists in general. Even at just full-time (i.e., 40 hours/week) you're likely well above the median earnings for clinical psychologists. Thus, while it might be great to use you as an aspirational example, it's unlikely that most psychologists in general will earn what you do, let alone ECPs, who have the lowest pay and the greatest need for income to start paying down their debts and get their personal and professional lives started. People can
try to work the number of hours you are, but that doesn't mean they will be able to do so at all or at least at the remuneration you receive. There are simply not that many high paying jobs out there for psychologists for everyone to have two of them. This difficulty is reinforced by competition with mid-level providers and from other psychologists in the oversaturated areas where many unfunded students tend to set up shop (often near their grad programs).
Furthermore, while it's great to use loan forgiveness programs to eliminate this debt, it's not exactly a great idea to stake your financial future on them. You're relying on something that is politically tenuous, just imagine how easily the means testers or anti-government ideologues would cut PSLF if someone used you as an example of someone taking advantage of it. As unfunded programs tend to graduate very large cohorts (e.g., at least 80 students per cohort at NOVA), there is going to be substantial competition amongst students from these unfunded programs
and between them and graduates from funded programs who want PSLF for themselves or just want the high paying jobs that would qualify. As others have already astutely pointed out and that I alluded to earlier, one of the reasons many grads selected unfunded programs is geographic limitations. Do you really think that people who weren't willing to move for the few years of grad school will be willing to move for ten years of PSLF, especially if they've already settled in the same city or state of their grad program? And that's not considering the perils of other loan forgiveness programs that result in tax bombs at the end or other issues.
Relatedly, unfunded programs tend to have worse outcomes than funded programs, which stem from poor quality control in admitting students (either those who are unprepared for grad school and those who will never be prepared and shouldn't become psychologists), too large cohorts, poor training, poor mentoring, etc. The most salient example of this are internship match rates. The aforementioned issues lead to unfunded programs having significantly greater difficulty matching their students to accredited internships than those of funded programs. If a psychologist did not complete an accredited internship, they are completely locked out of many of the higher paying jobs working for public and private entities. This also allows them to be exploited, explicitly or implicitly, by those employers who will higher them (e.g., bad splits, contracting work). Even if the psychologist had an accredited internship, many unfunded grad programs carry baggage which makes it difficult for their graduates to get their feet in the door for getting those high paid opportunities. Many psychologists here have spoken about how they don't even consider graduates from certain programs, while others may be considered, but are at the bottom of the pile after all the applicants from other programs are considered and crossed off. So, even those graduates from these programs who have good training may find it difficult to get those high paying jobs, even though they have even greater need than those from funded programs. If you combine these employment issues with the need for PSLF (or other loan forgiveness programs) and geographic limitations, you can see how much more difficult, if not impossible, things would be for the typical graduate of unfunded programs in handling six figures of debt.
Finally, the mentality of bootstrapping one's way out of debt or into a lucrative career is harmful to the profession as a whole. Even setting aside the issues of debt, expecting psychologists to work 60 hours/week, set up side hustles, or what have you to earn remuneration commensurate with their training and experience just entrenches the problems our field. That there are outlier success stories like you allows unfunded programs to trick the naive into accepting a huge burden that will severely hinder their future goals, as well as allowing these programs to continue pumping out graduates who are woefully unprepared to provide services to the public.
