Apparently You Need a Master’s Degree to Care

Years ago, I volunteered with a battered women’s helpline.

I loved the work. Social advocacy made sense to me, so naturally I asked whether there might be paid opportunities.

The answer came with sympathy.

I would need at least a master’s degree.

At the time, I had not even finished high school.

So I went back to the little room where I licked envelopes, gathered posters, and helped spread the word about violence against women.

Apparently I was qualified enough to volunteer. Just not qualified enough to be paid.

Funny how often that happens.

Qualified Enough to Care. Not Qualified Enough to Be Paid.

Institutions have become very skilled at separating care from compensation.

You can comfort people without a degree. Feed them without a degree. Advocate for them without a degree. Sit beside them in crisis without a degree.

You can open your door, make space, listen, organize, accompany, and quite literally help keep somebody alive without a degree.

But the minute you ask to make a living doing that work, suddenly somebody wants to see your credentials.

And let me be clear: I am not arguing that everybody with good intentions should be handed professional authority with no standards, no training, and no accountability.

That is not the point.

The point is that some of the most necessary care in our communities has always been done by people whose knowledge was learned through living, surviving, mothering, organizing, grieving, witnessing, protecting, and showing up.

Long before an institution gave it a name. Long before a university built a program around it. Long before somebody decided it only counted if it came with tuition and a certificate.

Care Has a Cost

I knew women who needed somewhere safe to go.

So for a period of time, they came to my home.

I had not set out to run a shelter. There was no grant. No office. No plaque on the wall. No official title.

There was simply a woman who needed somewhere safe to be.

And there was a door I could open.

That kind of care costs something too.

Not just time. Not just energy. Not just money. Sometimes it costs safety.

One abusive partner became obsessed with the idea that I was responsible for his partner leaving him, rather than considering the violence that made her leave in the first place. In helping somebody else survive, I placed my own family at risk.

Care has consequences for the people providing it.

Yet the people who do the caring most often are expected to absorb those consequences quietly.

Mothers. Grandmothers. Neighbours. Volunteers. Community workers. Women with lived experience. People who know what to do because life has taught them, often the hard way.

Systems lean on these people all the time.

They praise their compassion. They admire their resilience. They celebrate their sacrifice.

Then, when those same people ask for authority, employment, recognition, or proper pay, the conversation changes.

Now it is about qualifications.

That is a hell of a trick.

Who Gets to Decide What Knowledge Counts?

Because institutions benefit constantly from knowledge they did not create.

Community knowledge. Cultural knowledge. Survival knowledge. Relational knowledge.

The knowledge of how to calm somebody who is terrified. How to hear what is not being said. How to recognize danger before it becomes visible. How to help without turning a human being into a case file.

Then academia comes along, gives some of that knowledge formal language, charges people to study it, and hands somebody a credential that suddenly makes the same kind of knowing respectable.

I know something about that too.

Eventually, I went back to school.

I earned the credentials.

Bachelor’s. Master’s. Doctoral studies.

I had to become institutionally legible before some people were willing to believe that I already knew something worth knowing.

That should bother more of us than it does.

Because this is not only about me.

It is about who gets believed. Who gets paid. Who gets thanked. Who gets used. Who gets told to keep giving until they can afford the piece of paper that proves they were valuable all along.

It is also about whose labour is romanticized and whose labour is compensated.

Too often, the people expected to care from the heart are the same people denied the resources to care for themselves.

That is not generosity. That is exploitation dressed up as virtue.

The Question That Stayed With Me

So yes, education matters. I know it does. I have lived enough life to know that learning can open doors, sharpen language, deepen analysis, and create opportunities.

But the question that stays with me is this:

Why did anybody need a master’s degree before they could recognize the value of the work?

Because if care only counts once an institution stamps it, then a whole lot of necessary human labour is being overlooked, underpaid, and stolen in plain sight.

And many of the people carrying that burden are women who were never waiting for permission to know what they know.

Keep reading on Grandma Knows Best

If this raised questions about who gets recognized, paid, credited or believed, continue with the stories underneath those questions.

Read: Keep Your Name on It

Read: Who Gets the Pencil — and Who Gets Erased?