Archives
Faculty Senate spotlight on Social Work
By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor
The School of Social Work hopes to make "the top 15" of social work schools by the year 2020, to increase its number of faculty and full-time students, and to recruit more of its students from across the nation, Dean Nancy Smyth told the Faculty Senate on Tuesday.
U.S. News and World Report ranked the UB school 46th out of 159 such programs in 2004, according to Smyth, who said the school landed in that survey's top one-third of schools with "almost no publicizing" by staff.
The profession of social work grew out of two early movements in the United States aimed at helping the poor: the charity organization societies (COS), which began in Buffalo in the 1870s to better organize social services, and the settlement house movement, most notably Hull House in Chicago, which responded to growing poverty among industrial workers, according to Smyth.
As a result, social workers, who "are ethically obligated to work with people around the range of their needs," can choose to work in many areas, including health care, community services and government, she said.
Many of those jobs, however, are low-paying, even after 10 years in the field, Smyth said, so schools of social work, including UB, have become more creative in educating and training students for the working world.
Many social work professionals are returning as students to earn the doctoral degrees that are now available to them. UB's doctoral program in social work, begun in 1994, has a total of 17 graduates, 16 of whom now hold tenure-track jobs in university settings. The Ph.D. program has a current enrollment of 25 students.
Graduates with the master of social work degree, the school's "bread-and-butter" degree program, are among the nation's "primary providers of mental health services in the United States," Smyth said, while others enter jobs in criminal justice, policy analysis and public welfare.
But the number of working M.S.W.s is dwindling, so the UB School of Social Work has expanded its programs and options to continue attracting the best students to the field. Offering three campuses in addition to Buffalo—sites include Corning, Jamestown and Rochester—encourages part-time students to enroll. And the school established two dual-degree programs in recent years that pair the M.S.W. degree with a juris doctor degree in law and a master's of business administration degree. A program to offer a combined M.S.W. and public health degree is under review.
Today, the school has 520 students, of whom 410 are full-time, 88 percent are female and 21 percent are minorities. Smyth would like to see more students from outside of New York State, which 96 percent of current students call home.
The school also has established centers to promote research and community outreach, including the Buffalo Center for Social Research, which helps faculty and graduate students secure support for their scholarship, teaching and community service activities. The school also regularly places its students as interns at regional agencies and calculates these interns provided $1.3 million of service free of charge to agency clients during 2005-06.