Well, the San Francisco Bay Area is a great place if you're looking for an MSW program. In the immediate region, we have U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, and California State University East Bay at Hayward. Some folks live in the Bay Area and attend Sacramento State, but that's more of a drive than most people are willing to do.

The Bay Area _is_, however, quite expensive. The median home price for a single family home in Alameda County (including the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward, San Leandro, Livermore, and many others) was $665,000 in August of this year, an increase of 17.7% from the year before. But these county-wide numbers are thrown off by the fact that Alameda County has both pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of severe poverty. In Piedmont, the median home price for August was $1,540,000, whereas in Oakland, it was $534,000.

Its been awhile since I've done a job search (I've been with the agency where I work since 1996), but the impression I get is that there are a lot of human services agencies in the area but many had not been hiring much over the last year to year-and-a-half due to budget uncertainties. The State of California has had some budget woes and this always trickles down to the non-profit sector. I get the impression though, that things have been on the upswing over the last several months. I have noticed more job announcements for group and residential counselors and social workers. But I tend to notice those jobs relating to services for children and families. I'm not as aware of what is happening in adult mental health services.

I know that at my agency, we had not really done any significant hiring for about two years. We just now have hired approximately 35 new social workers for our Children & Family Services department.