Can You Learn As Much as a PhD Without a Degree in Psychology?
A PhD is as far as you can go in learning the science of psychology. It’s a path that can take you a decade or more to accomplish after graduating high school. You’ll pass through bachelor’s and master’s studies along the way, spend time conducting original research, undergo a year or more of supervised practicum and internship training on the job, and complete either a dissertation or a capstone project.
The process isn’t easy or inexpensive. Total costs for your education may be over $100,000 when all is said and done. The material is tough to master and the state of knowledge in the field is constantly shifting.
With all the time, expense, and effort involved in bringing home a PsyD or PhD in Psychology, it may be no wonder that some people are asking if they can learn just as much but without the degree.
Answering the Bigger Question About Learning Psychology on Your Own Should Start with Answering Some Other Questions First
Before you can answer a question like this, you have to answer another one first: are you more interested in psychology, or philosophy?
Because if you want to dig down deep into the epistemological core of what learning is, what it really means to absorb, integrate, and access information cogently and usefully, then, yeah, sure. Learning doesn’t rely on classrooms or pop quizzes. We all do it all the time without getting a gold-embossed piece of paper for our troubles.
If you have the discipline and the intellectual bandwidth, there’s no reason you can’t absorb the literature of psychology independently of college coursework.
Psychology is a field where all the answers are published. The information is all out there. It’s not locked away by an esoteric cabal, only to be disclosed after a secret handshake and the right password.
How To Find the Answers to Questions of Psychology Without Studying for a Full PsyD Degree
Let’s be clear right at the start: if you genuinely want to learn everything from a psych PhD program without going to school, it’s probably going to take you far more time, not less. There’s no organized equivalent to the information that professors put together for classes.
Yet all that information is available. And you can start in the same place the colleges do.
Crack Open Psychology Textbooks
You’ll find that your local university bookstore doesn’t keep these under lock and key. For every course that is taught in the psychology program, you’ll be able to buy the textbooks.
Even better, there are projects like the Open Textbook Library at the University of Minnesota that put some psychology textbooks online for free. There is also the Noba project, a non-profit organization that uses modular textbook compilations to provide high-quality educational information in a variety of fields, including psychology.
Go Straight to the Classics
For all that modern researchers have done to advance the field of psychology, it’s still a science that has its roots in the classics. The collected works of Freud, Jung, Watson, and other original thinkers are largely out of copyright and freely available to read for anyone.
Although our perspective on the field today has come a long way from their theories and observations, all the foundations come from their work—you’ll have an easier time understanding modern psychology if you start there.
Read the Research Yourself
You can also easily go straight to the source where most of the underlying data in psychology PhD degrees is coming from: research papers.
While some reputable journals charge for access to articles, there are efforts like the Open Psychology Journal that make them available for free. The APA, or American Psychological Association, also publishes select articles from more than 90 of its prestigious journal publications.
Stream Actual College Courses
Many large and prestigious universities are starting to put some of their more popular classes online as streaming video courses, available absolutely free of charge. MIT, Yale, and Harvard are all schools that put these lectures out either on their own websites or even on YouTube.
You can listen to some of the top minds in psychology explaining the field as clearly as they know how. These aren’t going to be the kind of upper-tier courses that come in PhD programs, but they can help you lay the foundations for more advanced knowledge.
Psychology Podcasts May Keep Up With Current Developments
TikTok or YouTube Shorts may be where all the kids get their psych studies fix these days, but it’s hard to recommend these pop psychology quick hits for PhD-grade education.
Podcasts, on the other hand, offer the kind of long-form content that can really dig into the latest developments in psychology research and theory. Some of these may also be available as video content.
The big benefit is that they are often put out by practicing psychologists and often include interviews with other working psychologists and psychology educators. So you can get into the practical, day-to-day challenges and applications for psychology, uncovered for you by the people who live through them.
As an added bonus, many podcasts tend to specialize in certain aspects of psychology practice or specific disorders, which can give you a real deep dive into areas that you are most interested in.
But if the answer is to whether or not you can get a PhD-level education in psychology in the most technical sense, there’s another question waiting in the wings: why would you bother?
What Would Be the Point of Learning Everything Needed for a PhD in Psychology Without Actually Earning a PhD in Psychology?
In theory, you can learn exactly as much as you would in a PhD in Psychology or PsyD program without actually getting a degree. But that doesn’t give you the same capabilities that a PsyD graduate has, not by a long shot.
We do understand the driving motivation here: psychology programs leading to a doctoral degree are lengthy, expensive, and in-demand. Entry is often competitive, even if you can afford it.
But there are good reasons for both the competition and the expense that go beyond simply learning the source material. The most important reason is that no matter how much you know, you can’t actually practice clinical psychology without a license—which requires a doctoral degree in every state.
Even for positions where a license is not strictly required in all states, such as in industrial-organizational psychology or social psychology, most potential employers will discard resumes without advanced degrees out of hand.
Clients want to see credentials, and a degree in psychology is going to be the bare minimum.
If you are just planning to go freelance and not get hired to a full-time position, that’s still no help. Building a reputation and credibility in the field all starts with a degree.
A PsyD degree from an accredited school offers assurances to potential employers and clients that qualified professors have delivered you approved psychology courses and reviewed and passed your work. Without that piece of paper, the only way for anyone to assess your self-taught psychology knowledge is to test you themselves. But that’s too time-consuming and unnecessary with so many graduates already in the market.
Do Your Really Learn Everything a PhD Would Learn Without Earning a PhD?
Anyone who decides to go down the road of self-study has a dangerous dead-end to avoid. Without professors to guide you, you don’t know what you don’t know. No matter how detailed you may be in building your own curriculum, no matter how diligent you are in nailing down every last piece of information, there’s a big risk that you will miss something simply because you didn’t even know to look for it.
You also have to ask yourself, realistically, how likely it is that you are actually enough of a genius to choke down a firehose of graduate-level research and analysis without the expertise of professional educators to walk you through it. Academic instruction is a skill just like the practice of psychology is. There is a science and art to presenting information in ways that make sense and are retained in the human mind. Can you genuinely replicate that kind of expertise through self-learning?
Can AI Teach You as Much About Psychology as You Would Learn in a PhD or PsyD Degree?
Artificial intelligence is a field that both springs from and is quickly altering the world of psychology. But is it also the secret to getting PhD-level psychology training without an actual PhD?
It’s no secret that people have been using LLM (Large Language Model)-based AI, like ChatGPT, to help themselves learn about new subjects. LLMs themselves are trained on oceans of information about language and connections, including most of the material on psychology that has ever been published.
And AI itself comes out of explorations in psychology and an attempt to replicate the neural networks of the human brain. You might say it’s already a great example of what such training can accomplish.
There’s no question that AI can state and restate, almost infinitely, published psychology materials until they are explained in a way you can understand. But the machine itself doesn’t understand the material. You have no guarantee that what you are getting from it is accurate.
Maybe even more important, in the field of psychology at least, is that your engagement over the inner workings of the human brain will be happening with something that is definitely not a human brain. There’s no real meeting of the minds in learning from AI. A human professor will understand where you are coming from, have a theory of mind for you, that allows for real connection and transfer of knowledge. They’ll know when you get it and when you don’t.
An AI will simply provide an infodump. It has no idea if you absorb the material, or how to figure out why if you haven’t.
Finally, how would you know? Without the kind of rigor and outside evaluation that you are subject to in a formal PhD program, the state of your actual knowledge will always be in question. Even if you think you know it all… maybe you don’t.
Engaging in Research Is Part of the Learning Process for PhD Psychology Students
There’s yet another piece to a PhD in Psychology and, to a lesser extent, PsyD programs that would be hard to replicate outside a degree: research.
Doctoral studies are at the leading edge of new discoveries and the development of new techniques in every field. Students in those programs are expected not just to learn material, but to create it. That very process of deep investigation, experimentation, and analysis is as much a part of the education as attending lectures or absorbing texts.
It’s essentially a collaborative process, as well. The independent mad scientists in a lonely laboratory on the hilltop is pure fiction. Psychological research happens in concert with other students, professors, and professionals in the field. Data is gathered with rigorous and widespread investigation and field trials. It’s not something you could accomplish on your own.
If you’re considering the study of advanced psychology without an advanced psychology degree, it’s clear you already have some reasons of your own. As long as you are clear on the limitations of the process, there’s no reason not to do it. In fact, you may well find as you study that the idea of actually enrolling as a PsyD student starts to look better and better.