Hundreds of Australian students are being turned away from postgraduate psychology courses each year. 

Australia is witnessing a surging demand for registered psychologists. Our country is facing a mental health crisis, and the Federal Government is only meeting 35% of its psychology workforce target, which is the largest shortfall of all mental health professions. 

Despite the overwhelming demand for psychologists in Australia, postgraduate psychology courses are critically underfunded, resulting in severely limited Commonwealth Supported Places within these courses in Australian Universities. The consequence of this chronic underfunding of postgraduate psychology is that undergraduate students are forced to compete for the exceedingly limited places available in such courses, which often only offer a handful of places, in order to gain registration as a psychologist. These are the very courses that are needed to boost the number of practitioners in the field. 

Much like medicine, psychology masters' degrees are expensive to facilitate, due to low student-to-staff ratios and high supervision and placement costs. Postgraduate psychology training is currently funded at a lower band than other health professions, with the Commonwealth contributing $13,000 per student, compared to more than $27,000 for degrees such as vet science and agriculture (Dalzell, 2022).

Psychologists and psychology students are urging the Government to increase funding for these courses, to help address this shortfall and make postgraduate study in psychology more accessible. 

If the Federal Government does not act now, the workforce shortage of psychologists is only going to increase further.

References:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-19/unis-lose-money-on-degrees-needed-to-boost-psychologist-numbers/101078968