Nope, social work is not just government jobs. My wife is a social worker at a hospice (not government). She had to have her masters to get the job. The next th

Nope, social work is not just government jobs. My wife is a social worker at a hospice (not government). She had to have her masters to get the job. The next thing she has to get is a clinical license. Fun fact, that's a paying internship. She pays a mentor for 2 years to watch her do her job. After the monitoring, my wife is eligible to take a test. If she passes that test, she gets the license. That licenses enables her to increase her odds of getting a social work job in a hospital or government job like the VA, which is not just hospitals. When all of this is said and done, she had her undergrad (fortunately paid for by her mother's employer, the school), which cost about 100k. Then we paid for her 30k masters. Now we'll pay 2-4k depending on the license mentor. So 132k for a job that pays...wait for it... at best 60k a year! Compare this to my BS in CS which opened at 42k and now is somewhere around 120k. Yay idiotic higher ed inflation. As an interesting side note, most of this stupidity is caused by the social workers themselves. Like Rodney Dangerfield, they felt like they got no respect from the doctors, legislators and nurses. So they actually pushed for laws around mandated education! They pushed for licenses. They pushed for licenses that could only be obtained with job experience! You couldn't get experience to get the license to get the job that would get you the experience! We actually fled Indiana because of it. Florida is more reasonable.