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Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends

BACKGROUND: Newly graduated physical therapists have high amounts of educational debt. Educational debt may negatively affect job satisfaction, aspirations for professional development, and choice of workplace setting. Research has not shown this association directly, yet it is conceptually supporte...

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Autores principales: Dickson, Tara, Mulligan, Edward P., Hegedus, Eric J
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10283217/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37340406
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04454-3
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author Dickson, Tara
Mulligan, Edward P.
Hegedus, Eric J
author_facet Dickson, Tara
Mulligan, Edward P.
Hegedus, Eric J
author_sort Dickson, Tara
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Newly graduated physical therapists have high amounts of educational debt. Educational debt may negatively affect job satisfaction, aspirations for professional development, and choice of workplace setting. Research has not shown this association directly, yet it is conceptually supported by the Labor-Search Model. The purpose of this study was to understand the role that educational debt has on additional factors related to job choice in the Labor-Search Model. METHODS: Retrospective data were captured through the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) for 12,594 licensed physical therapists within the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2014 to 2020. A fixed effects panel analysis, with inflation-adjusted educational debt as the variable of interest, was conducted to assess whether patterns of professional certifications, volume of work, workplace setting, and job satisfaction were related to educational debt. RESULTS: Educational debt was positively correlated with higher professional degrees (p = 0.009), the number of hours worked per week (p = 0.049), and expected number of years until retirement (p = 0.013). Job satisfaction was statistically significant (p = 0.042) and negatively correlated with educational debt. CONCLUSIONS: Those with higher educational debt appear to have the habit of working more hours per week and have a longer time horizon until retirement. Newly licensed physical therapists with higher amounts of educational debt are more likely to experience this trend. Income and job satisfaction demonstrated an interaction effect on educational debt, such that those with lower levels of income had a stronger, negative relationship between their debt and job satisfaction, as compared to those with higher income.
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spelling pubmed-102832172023-06-22 Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends Dickson, Tara Mulligan, Edward P. Hegedus, Eric J BMC Med Educ Research BACKGROUND: Newly graduated physical therapists have high amounts of educational debt. Educational debt may negatively affect job satisfaction, aspirations for professional development, and choice of workplace setting. Research has not shown this association directly, yet it is conceptually supported by the Labor-Search Model. The purpose of this study was to understand the role that educational debt has on additional factors related to job choice in the Labor-Search Model. METHODS: Retrospective data were captured through the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) for 12,594 licensed physical therapists within the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2014 to 2020. A fixed effects panel analysis, with inflation-adjusted educational debt as the variable of interest, was conducted to assess whether patterns of professional certifications, volume of work, workplace setting, and job satisfaction were related to educational debt. RESULTS: Educational debt was positively correlated with higher professional degrees (p = 0.009), the number of hours worked per week (p = 0.049), and expected number of years until retirement (p = 0.013). Job satisfaction was statistically significant (p = 0.042) and negatively correlated with educational debt. CONCLUSIONS: Those with higher educational debt appear to have the habit of working more hours per week and have a longer time horizon until retirement. Newly licensed physical therapists with higher amounts of educational debt are more likely to experience this trend. Income and job satisfaction demonstrated an interaction effect on educational debt, such that those with lower levels of income had a stronger, negative relationship between their debt and job satisfaction, as compared to those with higher income. BioMed Central 2023-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC10283217/ /pubmed/37340406 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04454-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Dickson, Tara
Mulligan, Edward P.
Hegedus, Eric J
Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title_full Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title_fullStr Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title_full_unstemmed Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title_short Impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
title_sort impacts of educational debt on physical therapist employment trends
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10283217/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37340406
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04454-3
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