I think what the original poster is trying to say is that the Doctor of Physical Therapy degree is a bad business decision. Although I may have misunderstood what he meant because the original post was grammatically incoherent and disjointed. Well lets look at the facts and see if the DPT actually makes fiscal sense. As we all know the DPT degree is four years of undergrad and three years professional school. The first four years typically cost 50K (state university) and the last three cost 100K(private university) add it up and that's 150K for your DPT degree. But that's not the end of the story. I think to be fair you have to add up all of the wages lost from time off of work while pursuing your professional degree. When I graduated high school I had friends that started work at the local lumber mill at $22 per hour. That's 44K a yr., now multiply that by seven, the number of years in school, and that equals $308,000 now add that to the cost of the DPT degree and you come up with $458,000. But wait! We still aren't at the actual cost because we haven't added the interest you will have to pay on your student loans. At 6.8% interest on 150K you are looking at paying an additional 185K over 30 years. So what is the total cost of a DPT degree? How about $643,000.00 Still think being paid as much as the city bus driver is a good deal? Now I know that some of you neophyte pre pt's are going to say, "Well, I love the field of physical therapy and I just want to help people and it doesn't matter how much money I make". Look, helping people is great but what you are forgetting is unless your daddy paid the bill for you the whole way through school you need to be compensated for the 643,000 dollars you spent obtaining your Doctorate of Physical therapy.
That was an excellent argument that left out a few particularly important and relevant facts:
If we look at the average salary of physical therapists across specialty areas in the US, we see an increasing wage over experience ranging from $55k/year entry-level to a little over $70k/year (
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Physical_Therapist_(PT)/Salary ). This, btw, is
substantially more than "the city bus driver" who makes between $14-18k/year
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Bus_Driver,_Transit_and_Intercity/Hourly_Rate The disregard of supporting your argument will weaken the product, which is a problem that you run into a number of times in your post, btw.
If we look at the earnings of an individual with just a high school degree, this ranges between $30-45k/year, so while your example of your friends going out and making $44k/year out of high school would probably not be representative of the earning power of a high school graduate, it's still within the range
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=High_School_Diploma/Salary
I didn't check your math, but I'l accept it as being accurate for the discussion. If we take $30-44k/year and look at lifetime earnings, we see a total of $1.4-2.1 million over the career (47 years). If we look at a new DPT however (graduating at age 25, they will have 40 years of professional work), they can expect $2.7 million dollars over the course of the career. If we subtract the $650/k of the cost of education, the PT will still make at least as much over his/her career vs. your high school grad, and the PT is likely to make double that of a high school educated individual, in fact.
While this may still not be a striking amount when we consider the time and effort put into the barrier to practice, or relative to a Bachelor's degree in science (which is generally about the same average salary as the PT with his/her graduate degree), we also haven't taken into consideration the intangibles, such as greater career mobility and income options (teaching, the option to provide continuing ed in a number of areas, etc) and, of course, a fulfilling career doing something that you love which might not be a great argument to an economist but something that absolutely cannot be overlooked. Add to this the fact that the DPT has at least the potential, as was already discussed in this thread, to improve the profession overall and income of all PT's over time (there are other ways to do this as well, too, of course), and there are added values to the switch that can't be evaluated by a number on a paycheck.
You don't become a PT to become economically rich, you become a PT to be enriched. But you won't be poor, either. If you want to be rich, choose another profession, because obviously this one will not offer you what you seek.