Degrees In Health Care

Healthcare degrees are the way to go these days. With the healthcare industry on the rise and graduates being snatched up twice, sometimes even thrice as fast as other degree options, prospective college students are attracted to an exciting field that yields both a rewarding job experience and that much-desired job security coveted due to the current economy.

But if you had to narrow down one healthcare degree that just might outshine the others, it’s physical therapy.

Physical therapy–sometimes referred to as “physical and occupational therapy” when it comes to campus and online college degrees, though physical and occupational therapists are actually quite different–is a very hands-on profession that involves lots of patient involvement and interaction. The ideal student for a physical therapy educational program is looking for:

• A job that brings the healthcare provider face-to-face with the patient
• A job that will directly affect the lives of others
• A job with a decent pay-to-education-required ratio and job security

So what is the nitty-gritty aspect of a physical therapist’s daily routine? They treat injures, or at the very least, work around the bodily injuries to prevent any further damage. They work with anatomy and themusculoskeletal systems, which brings them to the forefront of both muscle and skeletal problems.  They are specialized in rehabilitation, offering services that might not be readily available through the general practitioner.

Carrie Utic, a human resources manager for Puget Sound’s Apple Physical Therapy, was interviewed by the NW Jobs blog. She said, “The job outlook is very, very good for people in that field, for both physical therapists and physical therapist assistants.”

But physical therapy has had its share of academic inflation as well. Just a decade ago, a bachelor degree was the ceiling for getting a full-fledged physical therapy degree, instead of the potential boost to the master degree. In 1999, master degrees became the norm, and by 2003 the requirements for the most top-scaled physical therapists had shifted still further to doctorates. The extra schooling is beneficial: it gives the student the opportunity to learn how to open and run their own private practice.

An associate’s degree in physical therapy allows the student to start a career as an assistant, and then the student can move up from there into other rewarding career opportunities with a bachelor or master degree, and even the doctorate. The advantage to this step-by-step method of education is that the student could get started as an assistant at first while still attending school and simultaneously build up the resume–a strategy college students are seeing in general as the competitiveness of the job market becomes thicker and thicker.

If you know you want to go into healthcare, but you’re stumped where to get started, take some time to look more into a physical therapy degree!