Question by Kalla: Will life be hard if I don’t go to grad school?
For a msw

Best answer:

Answer by Caligula
Maybe. Maybe not It may be hard if you do go to grad school, too. Or again, it may not. There are no guarantees. Nobody will be able to give you a clear “yes” or “no” without making a lot of assumptions, some of which will be unwarranted.

If there’s something in life that you want, and if getting an MSW will significantly increase your likelihood of getting it (by definition, anything that *requires* an MSW falls into this category), and if you are likely enough to get it if you do get an MSW that the gamble seems like a good one, then get an MSW.

I don’t just mean a social work job, either. “Job security” and related things are perfectly reasonable things to want as well.

But there are jobs out there that you can get without an MSW, and there are jobs you can get without a bachelor’s, and depending on where you live (or where you want to move in order to live your adult life there) and what jobs are available and how likely those jobs are to either vanish or move elsewhere in the next half-century, and also depending on what sorts of things you like to and/or are willing to do, you might even have a better chance at job security if you skipped the MSW and picked up the want ads.

Think about what it really is that attracts you to the MSW. If you want to be a social worker, what is it about social work that attracts you more than, say, teaching or some kind of medical or related field? You may find that you don’t actually need to be a social worker to get whatever it is.

The odds are that a lot of whatever it is about social work that attracts you can also be done at a variety of non-profits. The pay probably isn’t very good, but when you are doing work that matters to you and gives you a sense that you are contributing to the community in an important way and when all the people around you are being paid similar amounts, that isn’t always that important to you. (If you intend to have children some day, then unless you plan on finding a spouse who makes a lot more money, low wages could be a problem. Working for a non-profit may not be something you’ll want to spend a whole career doing, unless you’re interested in the administrative side.) Have you looked into what kinds of jobs local non-profits are advertising for and what the pay range is? Do those jobs require graduate school? My guess is that most don’t. What about local nursing homes, assisted living facilities, independent living programs, group homes, halfway houses, and public and private institutions in which people live? How about hospitals? Daycare? After-school programs? Some people I greatly admire work at a “children’s center.” They work to ensure that kids from the poorest families, kids in foster care, and kids who are tangled up in court cases (criminal or civil) receive the counseling and other services they need and have things like birthday presents, new clothes and toys on occasion, etc., and most of them are not social workers.

I bring this up because it sounds as if you are looking at grad school as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. But it’s an expensive and time-consuming means, so it’s probably worth really thinking about whether there are other ways you could get what you want. Maybe you’ll decide, if you consider the situation carefully, that you would love to study social work in more depth. Maybe you’ll decide that grad school really is the best way of preparing yourself for the kind of career you hope for. Or maybe you’ll decide that it’s not for you, or at least not for you right now. All of those possibilities are perfectly okay. But the clearer you are about what you want and how to get it and the more informed you are about your options, the more likely you will be to make a whole slew of decisions about what to do next (I’m assuming you’re a college student or graduate now; if not, then I mean what to do later) that work out well for you. Maybe you’ll want to get an MSW, and maybe you’ll want to do it at a school that offers really good training in a particular area of social work. Or maybe you’ll want to move to a particular place and get an MSW there.

I’m at the point where I strongly suspect I’m just babbling 🙂 so I’ll stop now, but I hope some of this is helpful.

Add your own answer in the comments!

 

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