Up is Down

In an elevator going up to the seventh floor yesterday I debated graduate school with a nurse who just completed her BScN.
Nursing is a technical trade, I said. It makes perfect sense to me that one ought to hone that skills through further school and field practice. It can only make you a better nurse and a better teacher to others. Social work, on the other hand, is a value or a worldview. It is a set of beliefs about justice that inform how you live your life and interact with others. Many of these beliefs can be instilled in the individual through lessons on history and injustice. The student must be 'pushed' almost over the breaking point of existential agony before s/he can begin the battle for social justice.
MSWs and PhDs in social work are therefore useless, I argued. But you're doing your MSW now, she countered.
True. And I admitted it was about a combination of money and prestige. These are personal failings. So here's the dilemma of the day: if more learning simultaneously and potentially increases my understanding of social failings while also limiting my own experience of those social failings (by raising my standard of living), ought I to continue? In other words, the more I understand, the more power I have and the more distance is created between me and powerless people - those I have pledged to fight for.