Student Loan Repayment for Early Career Clinical Psychologists

This book confirmed that early career clinical psychologists repaying high levels of student loans relative to their earnings can expect to encounter a number of hidden costs and sacrifices during the initial repayment years. In other words, paying back student loans impacted the lives of the participants in the study in many ways they were unprepared to face, causing them chronic stress, and even outright suffering. The study revealed fourteen discrete themes related to the participating psychologists’ experience of student loan repayment. The themes organized into four categories, each constituting a core, meaningful domain of their endorsed and elaborated experience of loan repayment. The core categories were (1) Participants’ Experience of Financial Strain, (2) Participants’ Experience of Rewards and Sacrifices, (3) Participants’ Experience of Loans and Education as Investment, and (4) Participants’ Experience of Resilience and Growth. Indeed, the reported experiences detailed by the psychologists in the study were instructive as well as cautionary.