Who can afford to become a social worker?
From day one in social work school, we’re taught about structural inequality, poverty, burnout, how capitalism pushes people to the margins and the disconnect that can happen when professionals don’t understand the lived realities of the people they work with.
We talk constantly about the shortage of social workers and the importance of trauma-informed, poverty-aware care.
And then the training starts.
At that point, something becomes painfully obvious: becoming a social worker often requires being financially stable enough to survive years of intense unpaid labor.
The practical training is important. I’m not arguing against field placements or professional standards. Nobody wants undertrained social workers.
But the system is built around an unspoken assumption: that students should be ready for 3 to 4 years of almost not working.
A family safety net. A partner paying bills. Savings. The ability to work less. The ability to lose shifts.
And if you don’t?
Take loans. Burn out. Delay graduation. Drop out.
In social services, we already have a term for this kind of structural filtering: “creaming.”
Keeping the people who are easiest to stabilize, easiest to succeed, easiest to show outcomes with.
And everyone else slowly falls through the cracks.
What’s ironic is that social work programs openly teach us about structural oppression while reproducing it inside the profession itself.
Why is the training, where we are having patients we care for, has no financial benefit? Not even minimum wage, not even gas reimbursement?
There are scholarships, emergency support systems, flexible arrangements sometimes. Individual professors at times care deeply.
But those are usually crisis responses after someone is already drowning.
Meanwhile, students who have actually lived through poverty, housing insecurity, welfare systems, or survival-based decision making are often the very people pushed out by the structure of the training itself.
And yes — lived experience matters.
Not because people from stable backgrounds are incapable of empathy or understanding. But because there’s a difference between academically studying poverty and knowing what chronic financial anxiety feels like in your body.
There’s a difference between reading about homelessness and having experienced the fear of not knowing where you’ll sleep.
Capitalist societies constantly teach us to interpret poverty as personal failure: “work harder.” “manage better.” “be more responsible.”
That mindset doesn’t magically disappear when someone enters a helping profession.
So I genuinely wonder: what happens to a profession centered around social justice when the path into it becomes inaccessible to the people closest to the realities it claims to serve?