Many Clinical and Counseling Psychology Programs now offer doctorate in psychology (PsyD) instead of the more traditional doctorate in Philosophy (PhD). There is a lot of confusion about the difference in these degrees that I will try to clear up. The PsyD was developed by the American Psychological Association as a practitioner-oriented degree, modeled to some extant after the MD. The idea is that PsyD training would include research training but conducting research, especially basic research, would not be the focus of the degree program. Instead PsyD students would spend more time on clinical technique and focus their research efforts in more applied areas. Some believe that the APA developed the PsyD because of the proliferation of free-standing professional schools. These schools typically do not have the faculty or the resources to train students up to the research standards of university programs. Indeed, most of the professional schools clearly indicate that their mission is to train clinical practitioners. Like the MD, PsyD holders may elect to do more intensive training in research after they receive their degree, though this doesn’t seem to happen very often.
Many psychologists – academic and clinical – still look askance at the PsyD degree and there continues to be bias against it in the profession. However, the name of the degree may be a proxy for the real issue, which is the quality of education delivered by the freestanding professional psychology schools. Since most of these schools (due to pressure from the APA) now give the PsyD, the degree has become synonymous with the perceived lower educational quality of some (but not all) professional schools of psychology.