It's called "degree creep," the phenomenon in which fields require increasing amounts of education and higher degrees for entry.

"Up till about a couple years go you could actually get a bachelor's degree in physician assistant and be considered a practicing physician assistant," said Bryan Lewis, adjunct biology professor and health careers advisor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. "Well, those programs are disappearing. Now to be a practicing PA you have to have a master's degree." The same is true for other jobs. The master's degree in physical therapy has been replaced by a doctorate, he said.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College are both planning to replace their master's degree programs with doctorates for nurse practitioners and for some nursing specialties. This trend, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, is being driven by national professional associations which advocate the change to better prepare students to work in health care.

Physician assistant and nurse practitioner jobs were introduced in the 1960s to compensate for an uneven geographic distribution of physicians and primary health care, especially in rural areas and inner cities. In Wisconsin, 33 percent of physician assistants work in a metro area with more than 1 million people, 20 percent in a metro area of 250,000 to 1 million, and 22 percent in a metro area with a population less than 250,000. Just 0.6 percent work someplace not adjacent to a metro area, while the other people filled jobs in some kind of nonmetropolitan area adjacent to a metropolitan area. All of this is according to a 2007 survey by the American Academy of Physician Assistants.

The need for people in allied health professions, such as physician assistant and physical therapy has been an issue in health care for several years. Yet for some students having a health care career means only being a physician, nor have they looked realistically at the courses and grades required for medical school, Lewis said.

"And honestly, a lot of them haven't taken a look at the time frame," he said. "You talk to students about four years of college, four years of medical school, and a four-year residency. And so you tell them, 'You're 19 right now. Your first job will be when you're 31,' and that kind of catches them a little bit. And so a lot of them turn to other programs. You're still in the health care field. You're still making an impact on patients' lives, but you can do it in a more reasonable time frame."

All of the fields which Parkside health science graduates could enter have very high projected job growth for the next decade, Lewis said. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of physician assistant jobs will grow 27 percent between 2006 and 2016, same for physical therapists.

Parkside does not have data broken down far enough to know what graduates from what programs tend to remain in the area. Generally, said a university spokesman, about 75 percent of graduates remain in the area, defined as Milwaukee to northern Lake County in Illinois.