Is Physical Therapy School worth it? Tuition vs Salary

Physical Therapy as a profession dates back to the early to mid 1800s, when the term physiotherapy was first used to describe working with injured athletes, specifically gymnasts. Over time the profession evolved from humble beginnings, and with that came increasing education demands. In the 1950’s, physical therapists went from being considered “technicians” to “professional practitioners”. In the United States, Education requirements went from a Bachelor’s degree, to a Masters degree, and now to a Doctorate. As of 2015, all accredited and developing physical therapist programs in the US are Doctoral programs, with the earliest offering of a Doctoral program by Creighton University in 1993.

And of course with the increased education, comes increased cost. As of the most recent numbers, the average cost of a public school DPT degree was: $66,074. And the average total cost of private school DPT was: $113,497.

I’ve run the numbers of every PT school in the US, and compared that to average salary data for physical therapists.

So the real question is: In 2021, is it worth it to become a Physical Therapist?

Let’s face facts: College tuition is becoming increasingly expensive. In only 40 years, the average cost of college, including tuition and room and board, has increased over 150% for both public and private four-year colleges. 2 And that’s just the costs of undergraduate degrees.

The average cost of undergraduate degrees ranges from $38,320 for a 4 year public college, to $148,800 for a 4 year private college.

And since Physical therapy is a doctoral degree, the applicant is usually required to have their 4 year undergrad degree before applying to the 3 year graduate program. There are obviously exceptions to this rule — like direct entry colleges, and accelerated programs that are only 2 years long. But in general, expect to be in school for 7 years if you get into a PT program right away.

Next, is salary. I’m going to make an entire video on salary breakdowns for physical therapy, but the short of it is that according to the PT Pulse — the average PT salary across all settings in 2020 was $84,450 with a standard deviation of $13,334.

So that means 68% of PTs that responded in the data set had a salary range from $71116 to $97784.

And finally, the cost of PT school.

I went through and made a list of every PT school that was accredited, put it into an excel file, and calculated the total cost of tuition. There’s a download link in the description below if you’d like to see it. Just a quick note, I would bet money on the fact that I made a math error along the way or wrote something down wrong. If you find an error, let me know in a comment below and I’ll fix it.

From my calculations, after averaging all 260 accredited PT schools, the average total cost of PT school tuition I calculated was: $102,280. That was across all public and private schools.

And I found some interesting data. 113 PT schools had a total tuition cost of less than or equal to the average starting salary of a PT in the united states. And of those, only 31 schools had out of state tuition that was less than or equal to average PT salary.

The lowest cost for PT school was: Army-Baylor. Students actually get paid 41,000 per year to attend Army-Baylor, receive stipends, and have guaranteed job placement. That’s hard to beat.

Now, obviously you have to enlist in the Army, and it is not my intention to persuade anyone to do so. But if you are someone who has an interest in serving the country and wants to be a PT, this seems like the ideal scenario.

Outside of enlisting in the military, there are some very low cost options out there. Before we begin, these are all in state tuitions for the total program cost.

First, is Eastern Carolina University coming in at an amazing $21,366. University of North Texas comes in at $25,400. Georgia southern is $29,862. Next, is Texas Woman’s university at $32,876.

Now, as you can clearly see — the in state tuition for the colleges are substantially lower than the out of state tuitions. Which brings me to my first point: when looking for PT schools, I recommend applying to any in state public universities that are accredited first. Next, would be out of state public universities, and finally private schools.

At this point, I’ve thrown a lot of numbers and data at you. But let’s try to make it all make logical sense.

Here are some totals I’ve put together that show the average calculations.

The above combines undergraduate costs with graduate school costs and keeps in mind average salary.

The best financial case, is a public 4 year university combined with enrolling in Army-Baylor at a total cost of 38,320!

The worst financial case is going to an average 4 year private school with the highest cost DPT school — bringing your total to a staggering $354,565!

The average cost scenarios of a public university with a public DPT school would run you approximately $93,490.

As a general rule of thumb, if you can keep your total debt to income ratio to less than or equal to 1.0, I think you’re in pretty good shape.

For reference, when I graduated, I had $94,000 in debt total with a starting salary of around $72,000 in 2012 — I made a video about my loans you can see here. But I also did an extra year of undergraduate to increase my GPA because mine was terrible my first year of undergrad.. But that’s for another article.

So, in conclusion: Is it worth it to go to PT school in 2021? The answer is not simply a binary decision. You could come out of 7 years of college with as little as $38,000 in debt all the way up to $354,000 in debt. The average PT could reasonably expect to pay down $38,000 without major financial stress. While 354,000 would likely be an insurmountable number that you would be better off trying to get student loan forgiveness for than paying off the loan.

In my opinion, PT school is financially worth it if:

• You are able to keep your debt to income ratio less than or equal to 1.0 ideally
• You understand compounding interest, understand how much your loan will cost you in interest over time, as well as how much you will have to pay back monthly
• You understand the opportunity cost of a seven year doctoral program
• You love the profession of PT
• You are open to working in specialties that pay more, picking up PRN jobs to pay your loans more quickly, will consider a travel job for higher pay, or want to open up your own practice
• You spent time becoming financially literate, have a budget, and a plan

In my opinion, PT school is (probably) not financially worth it if:

• You are just in it for the money, the title, or the degree
• You accrue massive amounts of debt (>2.0 debt to income ratio) that you will struggle to pay off
• You don’t have a plan, a budget, or financial literacy on how to dig yourself out of debt
• If you do go to an expensive private school for undergrad and grad school, you should consider taking a travel/ home health / working an extra PRN job to pay down your debts faster, or a loan forgiveness option if available. If you won’t do those things, it’s probably not worth it.

But that’s just my opinion. Let’s look at some research.

A paper by Shields in 2018 did some modeling of how PT school compares to other professions. The study look at what’s called the “Net Present Value” of various professions. NPV is a cost-benefit analysis approach that models the monetary difference between a benefit to be gained (for example lifetime salary) and the cost required to obtain the benefit (for example educational cost). It does take into account time and opportunity cost.

In the paper, they compared the NPV of healthcare professions. The higher up on the chart, the better the NPV. As you can see, anesthesiology and surgery are at the top. Nurse practitioner and Physician assistant are high up as well, which are common alternative career paths. Physical therapy actually ranks around Internal medicine with no college debt, to just below Dentistry with the average debt of around 90,000. PTs on average come out above OT, a bachelor’s degree, veterinary medicine, and chiropractic. However, as the debt starts to mount, the NPV becomes closer to a bachelor’s degree — around the 250,000 mark.

In the paper, they state the benefits of the DPT degree begin to erode the cost at around the 150,000 in debt mark. But I would recommend running the numbers on your own.

And as one more reminder, don’t choose a career solely based on financial gain but always consider the financial consequences of any decision.

Final disclaimer: This does NOT include fees. Fees are variable and can add to the total cost of every school. Please, be intelligent enough to do your own research.