Social work students face economic hardship. Using a graduate student survey at a Midwestern university, we found social work students had greater loan use, stress, and insecurity, even compared to other care professions. These hardships are not explained by socioeconomic background or disability, suggesting structural issues in social work education.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of this session, attendees should be able to:
Understand how carework is linked to inequality. More specifically, attendees will understand how theories of lower pay in carework fields apply to graduate education and social work education. Attendees will understand how devaluing carework disproportionally impacts students with disabilities.
Conceptualize economic hardship as a multifaceted construct that includes poverty, financial stress, and insecurity.
Understand disparities in loan use, financial stress, and food and housing insecurity between students in social work, carework fields and other graduate fields at one research intensive university. Furthermore, understand in what areas social work graduate students have worse economic hardship, even when compared to other carework graduate students.
