Oversaturation of the field

[Mrsmojorisin]

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I've been wanting to become a PT for awhile now but there are some things about the field that make me wonder if this would be a good career for me and my family. My DPT friend was telling me how annoying it is that there are tons of DPT programs pumping out too many PTs and APTA is always approving new programs.. is this really something to be concerned about?

 

[jblil]

Read this thread, esp. the comments over the past 3 months:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=931151

 

[Azimuthal]

CAPTE approves education programs, not APTA.

 

[DesertPT]

I'm going to re-post something that I posted in an earlier thread. This is not to say that you should not take job prospects into consideration, but to highlight that job prospects in all fields (with the exceptions of perhaps medicine and accounting) are worse that what the BLS says and are in many cases downright bad, yet the sky need not be falling. If you choose a career based on having a guaranteed job, you have few if any options. As of right now there are very few PT's who are unemployed despite their best attempts,ss at least as far as I can tell. Are low-end PT schools opening up too rapidly? Yes. Are many of the 100,000+ people applying to PT school every year doing so because they think it will be a nice, family friendly job with fabled "healthcare job prospects", rather than because they want to be PT's? Probably. Should we all be sad about it and bemoan our fate all over the internet? That's up to you.

I started my "career search" quite a few months ago by being interested in PT. Since then I have researched literally dozens of careers over the course of hundreds of hours, and spent the most time on careers in healthcare (as I am a biology major). I recently realized I'd gotten to the point of "analysis to paralysis"...

I have seen every one of these dozens of times over: MD's saying they wish they would have gone to PA school. PA's being frustrated that they didn't just stick it out and go to med school. Pharmacists moaning about every freakin' thing known to man. Law school students saying they should have done computer science. Comp. sci. grads going to law school. Engineers going back to school to go into health care. Health care people telling people to go into engineering instead. Humanities PhD's working at Starbucks (wait that's not surprising actually )...

Point is that the internet is not a representative sample of reality. A good source of information? Yes. What you should entirely base major life changing decisions on? Not so much. The interwebs are highly biased towards the views of the pissed off and the frustrated. Literally every career option I've have looked at, be it MD, PharmD, PhD, DPT, PA, nursing, law, computer science, engineering, you name it, has led me to find people all over the internet talking about a glut of new graduates and a lack of the job they were dreaming of, and telling prospective students to really think about picking something else.

Well no fake! The economy is bad. People are going to college like never before. People don't have the money to spend on things that they did in times past. But should everybody in every profession throw their hands in the air and go on the internet telling everyone to pick a profession other than their own. Nope. Do something that will make you happy. You'll be fine. I'm choosing PT because it was what I was interested in from the beginning, not because some people posting comments on Yahoo Voices tell me I should or shouldn't.

Rant over 😀

If I was in the Pharmacy or Optometry forum, I could now safely bet on several comments from practicing pharmacists/optometrists saying: "You foolish pre-(insert porrofession here) student. You will realize one day how naive you were", or something to that effect. I guess I'll see if the same holds true for practicing PT's, although I must say I have seen very little of this in the PT forums so far.