Pursuing a doctoral is mainly an opportunity to build up one’s research skills and develop a more scientific approach towards a research topic. It’s also a course that offers a lot of exposure towards competence in practice and research analysis. That would definitely help a student of this course to have an edge over the others after one’s course completion. The degree that is awarded on the completion of this course is ‘Doctor of Psychology’. A doctoral degree is the highest academic degree that a person may obtain.

Duration and Eligibility

This course usually extends to three years if you are pursuing it full time, and five years in case you pursue it part time. Then again, some universities take into consideration the GRE or TOEFL scores. Both duration of the doctoral course and scores considered may vary from one University to another. A doctoral degree in psychology is a professional degree that is to be pursued only after obtaining a master’s degree.

Top American universities offering Doctoral in Psychology

Going by the National Research Council’s rankings, Stanford University’s doctoral in Psychology is ranked number one. Stanford University has had the Psychology department for over five decades now. Next in the row comes University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, then Yale University, followed by University of California-Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then comes Harvard University.

However, everyone cannot make it to the top institutes that are rated by the National Research Council. That could be for many reasons like unsuitable location, high living expenses, or because these top listed institutes don’t offer a doctoral course in your particular branch of interest. That is very much possible as there are various branches like Health Psychology, Medical Family Therapy, Marriage, Child and adolescent therapy, Treatment of Addiction Disorders, Supervision & Consulting, Developmental Disabilities, Industrial and Organizational Psych, Supervision and Leadership in Mental Health.

Then depending on your feasibility you could choose from some of the other American Universities like Claremont Graduate University that offers eight doctoral in psychology courses, University of Missouri that offers five doctoral in psychology courses, another leading University offering five doctoral in psychology is Duquesne University, Florida International University offers four doctoral in Psychology courses. The course fee again varies depending on the particular doctoral in psychology course that you choose.