The Price of Placement (Part 1): Basic Needs and Well-Being of the Invisible Social Work Workforce

Social work students are an invisible workforce of unpaid interns. To date, there are no national studies in the U.S. of the basic needs and wellbeing of students in field education. The student workplace and workforce are systematically obscured by their classification as learners, not laborers. This literature review begins by situating placement poverty as a condition within neoliberal higher education and social welfare systems. Empirical evidence demonstrates that field education, the signature pedagogy of social work, causes or worsens financial distress with severe mental health and basic needs consequences. Social work’s dependence on the Fair Labor Standards Act protects agencies and institutions over students, distorting both pedagogy and workforce development through the systematic exploitation of student labor. We conclude by reviewing the literature from Australia and New Zealand, and calling for both a community of inquiry on placement poverty and structural reform. The second part of this article will analyze the first nationally representative data from the United States on social work students’ financial, material, and psychosocial wellbeing during placement.