After spending four or more years in college, the achievement of a degree will be a sigh of relief and a promise that more money is on its way. But how secure is your future with a bachelor’s degree?

The normal education path assumed by most people in the United States is grade school, high school, then on to college if they want to make more than $30,000 per year.

As time moves on, more people advance on to college and more of them receive bachelor’s degrees. With the number of people who graduate ever year, some probably can’t help but wonder, “Is my degree even valuable anymore?”

“A master’s degree is becoming par for the course now,” communication studies professor Timothy Howard said.

As a professor and an active public relations proffesional, Howard gets to see two sides of the spectrum – the education side and the business side. He said he truly wants to see Sacramento State students become gems in society and knows that as the educational bar rises, he must encourage his students to press on to the top of their fields.

“I’m really considering going into the master’s program for architecture because interior design is way too competitive in California,” Nicole Marvin said, who graduated from Sac State with a degree in interior design. “Every time there’s a graduation, another 50 new interior designers flood the market with the same degree I have, fighting for the same jobs I’m fighting for.”

Many of your peers from Sac State, as well as colleges all over California, will be competing for the same jobs as you, and most of them will have the same degree as you. What will make your degree stand out from theirs?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that people 25 and older with a college degree increased by 20 million in the United States between 1992 and 2004, which is almost a 50 percent increase.

According to the Office of Institutional Research, Sac State awarded 3,691 undergraduate degrees in 1990 and 4,953 in 2005. That means over 1,200 qualified people are out looking for jobs every year, more than there were only 15 years ago, and this trend is continuing.

Those 1,200 people are only from Sac State. That’s not including the rise in undergraduate degrees from the other 23 California State Universities.

What about jobs that don’t require an advanced degree, but will pay more if you have one? If you don’t have the time or money to get an advanced degree and wish to pursue that kind of a job it means you would be competing against people with higher degrees than you, making it hard to gain a place on the employment ladder.

“In law enforcement, it’s hard to move up in ranks without degrees. You don’t really need one to be in law enforcement, but they don’t rank you on how long you’ve been working there, they pay you according to your qualifications,” Eddie Sapiro, a junior criminal justice major, said. “Basically, I’m just getting a degree to make more money.”

Is it even about more money, or is it coming down to job security? Earning more money is great, but getting an advanced degree costs money too. You have to look at where you weigh in with the competition for jobs with only a bachelor’s degree.

Statistics say the higher the degree you achieve, the more money you make and, more importantly, the more secure your job is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment rates drop from 1.8 percent with a bachelor’s degree to 1.6 percent with a master’s degree, and all the way to 0.9 percent with a professional degree.

Maybe advanced degrees are worth the struggle to find the extra time and money. There are jobs that have always required higher degrees, like lawyers, doctors, architects and psychologists, and most students who plan on pursuing careers in these fields are aware of the additional educational requirements.

“I want to be a counselor at a high school, and when you’re analyzing people, it makes sense to be required to have a higher degree,” sophomore Megan Kemper, a psychology major said.

Among the most common majors doing graduate work at Sac State are education, health and human-service related majors. Currently, there are about 4,900 students working on their master’s degrees at Sac State. As the expectation of higher education rises, people continue to excel. The bar is going up and students in the next 10 years are going to look at education and the job market much differently than now. Casey Farrell can be reached at [email protected]