 Is a social work degree or a social work major or a bachelor's and social work worth it? That's what we're gonna be talking about today. Is it worth it to go $40,000 in debt and spend four years plus in school in order to get this degree? Now this one hits close to home because my sister is actually a social worker. So first thing we need to do is define what exactly is social work? Well, social workers basically get to assist people that are in vulnerable positions in society. They help people access community resources like healthcare or food. They also respond to crisis situations often with children and they can even provide some level of psychological therapy. Oftentimes they'll be working with people within groups or families. Now getting a bachelor's degree in social work is going to be referred to as a BSW. That's kind of the common jargon they use. And 21,000 people here in the United States get a bachelor's and social work every year. So this is a very common degree and of course the most common career path is going to be becoming a social worker. But you can also become a probation officer, a community service manager, somebody who hopes with correctional treatments. Now in these videos, I like to go over four really important areas that if you are looking into a college degree deciding if it's the right one for you, you wanna pay attention to these four areas. So the first one because of the fact this is a personal finance channel, we are going to be talking about salary or earning potential. Then after that we're gonna go over satisfaction, demand and then X factors. And you're gonna wanna stick around for this one because the results are going to be very interesting. So first we're gonna be talking about salary or earning potential. And with this degree you can expect to make around 36,000 a year starting out and 51,000 in mid-career pay. Now you can compare that to a really low paying degree and a very high paying one and you'll see that it is almost as low as the one that I use to set the bar for the lowest paying degree. So that's definitely not a good sign just to put this in perspective. The average person in the United States is gonna make around $50,000 a year and that's people who went to college or didn't go to college. And on top of that these pay scale statistics that I use tend to be a little bit higher than it actually is because of the fact it's kind of like their methodology, the fact that they don't necessarily include all the people who are unemployed. Now if you became a social worker you would expect to make around $50,000 a year or $24 an hour. If you became a probation officer or correctional treatment specialist you'd make $54,000 a year or $26 an hour. And if you became a social or community service manager you'd make around $67,000 a year or $32 an hour. Then I'm also gonna put up a few other career paths you could potentially go down. Some of them are going to require further studies but these are a few other ones. And you'll see that most of them are extremely low paying unfortunately. For instance, rehabilitation counselors only make $35,000 a year and they require a master's level degree. That is, that's not good. Now very generally speaking if you look at social science degrees in general you'll see that over a lifetime they make around $2.5 million. This is compared to the average degree overall which makes 2.4 million. Also keep in mind that this is census data from the last 40 years so it might not necessarily be the same way 40 years from now. And then another thing to keep in mind is a lot of people who get social science degrees almost half of them in many cases end up going back to school getting a master's or a doctorate which of course that's not really an apples to apples comparison comparing an engineering degree at a bachelor's level to a different degree at a doctoral level isn't necessarily fair. So the good news here is it is one of those degrees that directly leads you to going into a particular career. So there's a lot of degrees out there where when I show you the pay it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense just because of the fact that most people who graduate with a degree don't end up getting a job in that field. So sure the pay if you're able to get a job might be decent but there's a good chance that they either don't get a job or they're working in something that's completely unrelated. So overall when it comes to salary I have to give this one a score of about 5.5 out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about satisfaction and with this one I like to break it into two different parts. First I wanna talk about meaning which is basically how much you think your job positively impacts the world. So with this degree for instance going back to pay scale it has a meaning score of about 77%. You can compare that to a really high meaning score and a low one and you'll see that it is definitely on the higher side which is good news. Same thing goes if you look at the specific career of social worker the meaning score is around 73%. So you can tell that people who get into this line of work are people who are interested in making the world a better place and they think that they are actually improving things. That can be extremely important it kinda depends on the person. For some people they would love to play video games all day where you're not necessarily improving the world but you're enjoying your job. And then for other people that would get really boring really fast and you'd want to get into a job where you're actually having an impact. Now if you look at the job satisfaction rating for social workers it's around 59% which is slightly above average and again you can compare that to a good one and a bad one. So job satisfaction doesn't seem to be as high as the meaning score and there's quite a few different reasons for that and again I have some personal insight on this. For one when it comes to salary of course it's not the most important thing and it's not the thing that you should focus on but your happiness does in fact increase up to a certain point the more money that you make. This has been shown with study after study usually it's around $75,000, $80,000 a year but of course it depends on where you live and a bunch of other factors and the fact that a lot of social workers are going deep in debt and then they also don't make very much they start off making you know 30 something thousand a year in many cases that's not good when it comes to your happiness. Pretty much all your salary is just gonna go to your day to day expenses and paying off your student loans. So it isn't necessarily that making more money is gonna make you more happy it's just that making less money increases your unhappiness if that makes any sense and so when you make more money you decrease your unhappiness because when you're making less money you're gonna be stressed out all the time about bills and your loans and all kinds of things that if you were just making a little bit more you wouldn't have to worry about. Now on top of that a lot of the time social workers are going to be overworked so there's gonna be a really heavy case load you're gonna be dealing with people who are in pretty bad situations in many cases you're probably gonna be seeing things that are not that fun to see people that are in bad situations a lot of the time they're gonna be children and so that can definitely take an emotional toll on you and that can be true for a lot of different healthcare degrees in general. Now when it comes to how much people regret getting their degree this one would be considered a social science degree and it is the fourth most regretted type of degree and the most common reason is because it's too general and practical hard to find a job without further studies. Now to be fair here social work is one of the most practical degrees that you can get. Now one thing to keep in mind here is that when it comes to satisfaction meaning job satisfaction, et cetera there's a lot of other factors that go into it it could be where you live the people you work with, your boss the company you work for the industry you work in, et cetera. It's also extremely person to person so for one person they might enjoy doing this job and for another person it might be awful. So keep that in mind, take this with a grain of salt but overall I'm gonna give this one a score of 7.5 out of 10. All right, so next we're gonna be talking about demand and this is probably the most important one on the entire list when you're talking about most types of majors. However, it can be a little bit weird when you're talking about degrees where you're likely going to get a job with the government and in many cases social workers are going to work for a government entity or a semi-governmental entity in some cases. So when you look at the career of social work you see that there's 713,000 jobs available right now and it's growing at 13% which is much faster meaning over the next 10 years there's going to be 90,000 new jobs that are created. If you look at probation officer or correctional treatment specialist there's 91,000 jobs available right now and it's growing at 4% which is as fast as average. And when you look at social and community service manager there's 175,000 jobs available and it's growing at a whopping 17% which is much faster than average. And if you look at the unemployment rate for social workers it's actually one of the lowest on the entire list at least it was a few years ago. Who knows what's happening in 2020 everything is completely wonky right now but generally speaking when we don't have a pandemic going on all over the world when it comes to unemployment rate social work is actually pretty good. Now another test you can do is look up the degree on monster.com. So for instance when you look up social work degree you'll see that there are 24,000 jobs that pop up and you can compare that to a really high in demand degree like computer science or one that's not so high in demand like anthropology and you'll see that it's pretty good. Now when you look at companies that are specifically looking for people with social work degrees that is going to be relatively rare. So for instance when Fortune 500 companies are surveyed when you look at the types of social science degrees they're looking for social work is one of the lowest only about 15% of companies that are looking for people with social science degrees are looking for social workers specifically. But like I said before it can be a little bit off when you're looking at careers where you'll likely be working for the government. So there might not necessarily be a lot of demand on the open market. However, you're gonna be able to get a job with the government in many cases. So overall when it comes to the demand it's not amazing but at the same time it's not horrible. I'm gonna give this one a seven out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about X factors and this is basically anything that I didn't go over before but I think is still important. So remember when we talked about how social science degrees in general will make around $2.5 million over a lifetime according to the US Census. Well a lot of the time it depends on what career path you end up going down. So for instance if you wanted to be a social worker and get into more of a management role you would likely make quite a bit more. If you look at how much social science degrees make that go into management it's around 3.4 million over a lifetime. So way more. Now when you look at the specific skill of social work you'll see that on Zippercruiter skill index they have it at a 61 out of 100 and you can compare that to software engineering at 88 out of 100 and industrial sewing at eight and you'll see that it's not bad. I mean it's kind of average or maybe even on the higher side. So I think it's obvious that this is a pretty valuable skill. It might not be compensated that way on the open market. However when it comes to value to a society social workers are extremely important. Now on top of that a lot of the time social science degrees in general are gonna teach you soft skills that might not directly end up making you more money. However indirectly not only will they help you make more money but they'll just help you be happier and live a more successful life in general. Things like critical thinking being able to digest a lot of information quickly being able to formulate an argument and then deliver that argument in person being able to communicate, give speeches, et cetera. These are all things that are very valuable they're intangible, kind of hard to measure how much they help you in real life. However in many cases they are going to help you out later on down the line. Now when it comes to automation that's a little bit of a mixed bag here. So for instance probation officers have about a 25% chance of being automated which is on the higher side. However when it comes to social and community service managers it's only 0.7% which is good. It would also be very difficult to outsource this kind of work because you kind of have to be there in person talking to people, communicating. There's a lot of creative intelligence that goes on. However there are several things where this degree has some downsides to it and the first one is going to be flexibility. So there's a lot of majors out there where you can get the degree and you don't really need to plan ahead all that much because there's so many options for you. So for instance a lot of the business majors and engineering majors they can end up working in completely unrelated jobs just because of the fact that the degrees are so flexible. That's not true with all majors though in many cases you need to plan ahead and make sure you know exactly what career you're going for. And that's very true in this case because social work as a skill is going to be somewhat limited in terms of the careers that you can go into. The second thing is many people end up going on to get a master's in social work which is usually gonna take an extra one to two years. And the reason for this is because like I said before you're somewhat limited with a bachelor's and then you'll also make more money with the master's as well. However you'll also have to spend extra time and take out extra loans and MSW schools are kind of just popping up all over the place. It is getting to the point where they are churning people out and many of these programs are not necessarily the best and they will probably rip you off in terms of how much they charge you. So that's one thing you should be very careful of and look into. Talked about this a lot on the channel but especially when it comes to masters and doctoral level degrees they can charge you pretty much as much as they want sometimes over $50,000 a year. So overall when it comes to X factors I'm gonna give this one a 5.5 out of 10. So overall you take all those scores, add them up and divide by four you're gonna get a 6.375 out of 10. So if you really know what you're getting into you know exactly what you wanna do this can be a good one. However you need to realize that this is not gonna be one of those careers we're gonna make a lot of money so you need to be someone who's okay with that. It also has quite a few limitations when it comes to flexibility and your options after graduating. Now as always I recommend on this channel that you do your due diligence, do your research I have lots of videos on how you can do that. Make sure you reach out to people who are in the career ask them what their opinion is on what you should do but as long as you've done your research and you know exactly what you're getting into this one can work out for you. It's definitely one of those careers that's valuable to our society. However a lot of people who get into this end up being extremely unhappy with it just because in my opinion they probably didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Now if you'd like more help researching college degrees and you don't want to wait for me to make a video because I've got like a thousand in the backlog right now check out my college degree ranked down in the description below in my Patreon. This is a resource that will make your research much easier and I worked really hard on it. Pretty soon I am gonna be coming out with version two as soon as everything in the world kind of calms down. And if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera especially if you're someone who graduated with this degree I appreciate your insight. And if you haven't done it already share these videos. Sharing actually helps with the YouTube algorithm. I'm not sure if liking even helps that much but sharing definitely helps. And before you leave check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]