Just don't forget what a privilege it is to be turning down work offers. I have a Master's Degree in my field from what is consistently ranked the best school for that field and haven't been able to find a job in that field for over a year, and the last job I was offered, that required a Master's and experience, was for $27k a year.
I have a job (and I work in tech with a math degree), but I don't have all these recruiters beating down my door or sending me emails every day either.
Social Work, with an emphasis on research and macro-level policy work, but some teaching jobs would certainly apply as well. Still want to solve hard social problems, but have decided there is too much friction in the traditional human services fields and NGOs to make much headway that way, as well as a burnout trap. So at the moment I am just doing IT consulting for small non-profits, heading to a programming bootcamp this fall, maybe another one over the winter, hoping to eventually work on interesting social problems from a coding angle. Or work a bit on something not so interesting, enough to pay the bills, and become time-rich to work on interesting and fulfilling projects pro-bono.
I'm sure you knew that Social Work is low paid before you invested in such a degree. While it's a valuable field hypothetically, who actually hires a social work master degree person -- no company that actually expects a profit. As a result the market doesn't value such qualifications. Just sayin'. With software, engineers are hired to add value to a company which means they can make more money, which is kind of the point of a company in the first place. There's also a supply and demand issue. Low demand for Social Work and an oversupply. Social Work is almost as low-valued as an English literature degree. I'm not hating on Social Work, but your plight is certainly no surprise and elicits little sympathy as social work has never been a high demand profession but folks still spend tens of thousands of dollars in schooling and wonder why they aren't getting hired.
I don't believe the market is particularly good at determining value in anything other than the most short-sighted terms. I think there's a hell of a lot of teachers, social workers, and others bringing more value to the world than some software developer cranking out brochure web sites, making banner ads, cranking out another zynga game, etc or some management consultant that talks in nonsensical corporatespeak that is paying paid hundreds of dollars an hour to advise some company on its decision-making processes.
I'm not complaining, I'm the first person to admit about the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the modern non-profit industrial complex, I'm jut saying most of the world rolls their eyes when they hear people talk about how hard it is to be offered all these jobs. I chose to go into debt because I was studying interesting things (non-linear systems modeling as applies to social systems/problems) and I thought the academic credentials could provide an on-ramp to being able to work on big social problems on inter-disciplinary teams. This didn't happen, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because social work itself doesn't value itself as a distinct and credible field the way, say, economics does.
All that being said, most of humanity still doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing how they want to put food on the table, so it just smacks of privilege anytime I hear anyone whining of too many job offers, etc.
Agree with you that the market isn't able to pick out value, especially value that isn't easily exchangeable for money. Social work is of indispensable value from a particular perspective, and social workers are in short supply in many countries including my own (Singapore).
However the market does not exist by itself, it exists in a structure put in place by governments, with many other players such as non-profits, interest groups, etc. At this point in time, social workers, teachers, etc. have to be supported by funding from governments and donors.
Short of having a more enlightened economic system, what we can hope for right now is for governments to better reward professions that provide such value.
