Unpaid Work Experience Is a Requirement That Harms Students in Social Work, Nursing, and Teaching
Teen Vogue • By Rainesford Stauffer • July 5, 2023
“At the nursing home where Alejandra Luis, 23, works, she spends time seeing clients, working on referrals and discharges, doing client assessments, and doing computer work like keeping notes on client charts. Her placement there and the work that comes with it is a requirement of her master’s in social work program and that labor is unpaid.
Recently, the social worker on staff retired, so now Luis and another staff member share a lot of those responsibilities, too. Luis is living at home with her parents, roughly an hour's commute from the campus where she’s pursuing a master’s degree in social work, and is the first high school and college graduate in her family. She can’t afford to live alone.
Luis meticulously budgeted gas money for the entire semester, knowing she can’t drive any more than those allocated funds allow. She has no health insurance and had to stop seeing her therapist. Attending classes and working at the nursing home didn’t leave enough hours to squeeze in her day job at a bank, so she’s living off student loans and credit cards and will graduate with roughly $90,000 in student loan debt. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to pay it off.”
