Is higher education worth the money for police officers in smaller agencies?

I live and work as a police officer in New Hampshire. I have a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice and am enrolled as a student in the Doctorate of Education program at Rivier University. The cost for Master’s degree and the Doctorate is in the thousands. Is it worth it? I ask the question because there is very little information on the impact of higher education on the efficacy of police officers in smaller departments.
I did a literary review on the impact of education on the efficacy of police officers. (Which you can read at www.forensiceducation.net) I looked at the effect of education on use of force, performance, promotions and complaints against officers. Sixty-one percent of the sources reviewed showed a positive effect from education and 35% of the studies were neutral or inconclusive. Only 1 of the 22 articles reviewed showed a negative result. The problem was the groups of police officers that were studied. The research in the effect of education on police officers focused on larger police departments. All of the studies I reviewed looked at departments that had more than 100 sworn officers. All of the studies looked at departments that served more than 50,000 citizens with only 2 of the departments serving less than 100,000 citizens.
I started this post with the fact that I work in New Hampshire because New Hampshire only has a few cities that have more than 100,000 citizens. New Hampshire police departments are mostly smaller agencies. What effect does education have on the promotion rate of a police officer who works in a department that has 10 full-time officers? I was not able to find any research that explored this idea. This is not a unique problem to New Hampshire. How many police departments in the United States employ less than 10 police officers? According to the Bureau of Justice Studies, 49% of local police departments employ less than 10 police officers. Three-fourths of local police departments serve a population of less than 10,000 citizens.
Each area that I focused on, use of force, performance, promotions, and complaints, would need to be examined separately in the smaller departments. Higher education could have the same effect on use of force for both rural and city officers, but there may be a larger degree of discrepancy in the area of the promotional rate. The same could be said for each of the themes stated above. The impact of an experiment that explores the relationship between higher education and police officers in smaller agencies is unknown. If the results are positive, police administrators would continue to encourage higher education for their officers. Police officers are getting higher education degrees at a faster rate than any other time in history. If the results of the experiment is negative or neutral, smaller towns may not see the benefit to fund higher education programs. As of 2008, 57% of police agencies provided their officers some type of college tuition reimbursement. Those programs could be at risk if the benefit for smaller agencies was not realized.
If the result of higher education on the efficacy of police officers in small agencies is positive, further studies would need to continue in the area of online learning. In my review, I recognized that the studies looked at education as a whole. It did not compare online education with traditional education. There is a never ending list of online criminal justice programs available. The studies did not report a clear link between the degree the officers obtained and the officers’ performance.