Petition Summary and Background
Silberman School of Social Work’s licensing body, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), has a field education requirement of 900 hours for a 2-year graduate program. SSSW requires 1200 hours total. This is considered among the “best practices” decided on by the Social Work Education Consortium of New York.

This additional 300 hours translates to approximately 1 extra day of field education every week of a 15 week semester. A small survey sample shows that the vast majority of students support a reduction of field education required hours. This petition seeks to back up these findings and to demonstrate school-wide support for a measure to eliminate these extra 300 hours.

We, the undersigned are concerned Hunter students who urge our leaders (the administration of CUNY, Hunter, Silberman, and The SW Consortium) to act now to….
Reduce field education hour requirements from 1200 to 900 for a two-year program*.

*For students who seek a more rigorous weekly schedule (or who have other education quality and work quality concerns), we advise that this hour reduction be flexible. Hypothetical example: a student could work either 15 hours per week for 15 weeks in a semester, or 21 hours per week for 10 weeks.