Maria Rangel earned her MSW in May from Loyola University Chicago and already has a job. The 50-year-old native of Mexico, who is fluent in Spanish and English, was offered a full-time job by the community service agency where she did one of two internships prior to graduation.
Jaileene Arriaga is a year away from earning her MSW at the University of Connecticut but has already been offered a full-time job at the community service agency where she interned. The 27-year-old Hartford native, who is of Puerto Rican descent and is fluent in Spanish and English, is hoping to postpone her start date until after she graduates.
Rangel and Arriaga are bilingual, bicultural social workers, which makes them highly sought after by social service employers. They enrolled in MSW programs that offer coursework in Spanish and English and focus on producing graduates with the skills to serve Spanish-speaking populations in their communities.
The social work profession needs people with this kind of professional and linguistic skill set to serve an increasingly diverse U.S. population. Experts say there is a shortage of social workers who are fluent in a language other than English.
Kimberly Warmsley, LCSW, executive director of NASW’s California chapter, said there isn’t a database that shows precisely how many bilingual social workers the country needs, and how many there are.
But there is clearly a shortage of social workers in general, and the problem is that much more acute when it comes to finding social workers who are skilled in more than at least one language besides English, Warmsley said. That’s certainly the case in California, the nation’s most populous state and one of its most diverse.
“The need is there. And we know that the supply chain is low,” Warmsley said. “So, yeah, the house is on fire.”
The shortage is being felt more acutely in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Warmsley said, pointing to a surge of poverty, racism and mental health issues.
And when the clients who have these critical needs speak and understand limited English, it’s imperative to have social workers who can understand them. But often there’s no one—or just one or a handful of social workers—who speaks English and at least one other language to serve a vast, multilingual population in need of housing and educational services, therapy and counseling, immigration assistance, and help with a plethora of other issues.
“I am an African-American woman and I’ve had Spanish-speaking families that love me to death. But I’m also not ignorant of the fact that it is a lot easier when you have a therapist who does speak Spanish as opposed to using interpreters,” said Warmsley, who speaks only English. “We need to be looking at opening up pathways for people who have multilingual experiences, but we don’t talk about that enough. When we are in school for social work, we learn a lot of European theories. Well, guess what? It’s 2024. It’s a lot more diverse.”
A Problem Years in the Making
Though this shortage of bilingual social workers isn’t new, it’s persistent. The supply of bilingual and multilingual social workers has never kept pace with the demographic changes in the U.S. Some experts say that’s partly because immigrant families tend to push their children toward more lucrative careers like medicine and law.
Victor Manalo, PhD, MSW, a Filipino-American and the president of the board of directors of NASW’s California chapter, recalled that when he was doing his social work internship in the 1990s in south Los Angeles, there was one Spanish-speaking clinician to serve the needs of all Spanish-speaking residents—half of south LA’s population at the time.
“Thirty years after my internship, we’re still talking about the problem of getting people who speak the language of the people they serve,” said Manalo, who runs a social work consultancy and teaches at California State University-Los Angeles.
Thankfully, students at bachelor’s and master’s level social work programs are increasingly cognizant of the need for bilingual graduates—and many of those with the linguistic ability are interested in returning to their communities to serve, Manalo said.
There’s also a growing awareness among social service agencies that they need to diversify their staff, which accounts for the growing demand, Manalo said. But change is slow, and experts say more policymakers need to prioritize funding to hire a larger multilingual, multicultural workforce.
Manolo said the social work profession also needs to do a better job of marketing itself. Unlike doctors and teachers, it’s “hard for us to define what we do” because social workers do so many varied things, he said. And if social workers find it hard to explain what they do, then it’s no wonder the public has a fuzzy understanding of what the profession entails.
“When I tell people I’m a social worker, I get puzzled looks,” Manolo said.
High Demand Nationwide
The demand for bilingual workers has always been high in border states like California, Texas Arizona and New Mexico, and social work programs in those states have tried to increase the supply of bilingual and multilingual graduates.
For instance, New Mexico Highlands University’s Facundo Valdez School of Social Work has been offering a bilingual/bicultural concentration as part of its MSW program since 2005—one of the first schools in the nation to do so, according to program coordinator Reyna Rivera, MSW, LCSW. In fact, the social work school says online its mission is to graduate students with the requisite skills and ethical principles “to practice with Hispanic, American Indian, and other diverse populations of New Mexico and the Southwest.”
What’s been happening more recently is social work schools in states far from the southern border—like Illinois and Connecticut—have begun offering tailor-made programs to increase the supply of bilingual and bicultural graduates to serve their growing Latino populations.
Dr. Maribel Lopez, EdD, MSW, the director of Loyola University Chicago’s online bilingual MSW program and a clinical associate professor at the school of social work, said Illinois’ immigrant population has been rising, especially since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s. According to Lopez and Ivan Medina, a clinical instructor in the program, immigrants came to work on farms and in meat-packing plants in rural southern and central Illinois, and in manufacturing—particularly steel mills—in the Chicago area.
Even though the children of Chicago-area immigrants who became social workers stayed close to home, “there still were not enough Spanish-speaking social workers for the large Latino population in the city, and this has been exacerbated recently by the large numbers of Venezuelan immigrants that have arrived in the city in the last three years,” Lopez said.
There are many reasons why it’s hard to get bilingual applicants to social work programs. For one, many children of immigrants don’t speak the language of their parents all that well or at all, focusing instead on mastering English to better assimilate into U.S. society.
Manolo, who was born in the U.S., said his parents discouraged him from learning Tagalog. As a result, he never attained fluency. Rivera said there’s such a high rate of “language trauma” among young Latinos that they’re increasingly demanding dual language programs at the K-12 level to become more proficient in Spanish. Economics also plays a role.
“Most Latinos who get to college are likely to go into better-paying professions. Additionally, there may be a lack of resources and support for Spanish-speaking social workers, such as limited bilingual training programs or cultural competency training,” Lopez wrote in an email. “This could discourage individuals from pursuing a career in social work or limit their ability to serve Spanish-speaking communities effectively. Furthermore, low wages, high workloads, and limited job opportunities may contribute to Illinois’ shortage of Spanish-speaking social workers.”
The Loyola Experience
Loyola says its online bilingual MSW program is the first of its kind in the inland United States and is designed to produce social workers with the skills to work with Latino, immigrant and refugee communities. A diverse faculty teaches the courses in Spanish and English, and students can turn in their assignments in either language.
Launched in the fall of 2018, the program takes three years to complete for applicants without a bachelor’s degree in social work and a year and four months for those with BSW degrees. The program now has 97 students. Since its inception, it has graduated 106 people with MSW degrees.
“We were lucky that we had a visionary dean who was committed to developing programs for underserved communities at the time. At the same time, the university had set up a special fund that provided million-dollar grants for over three years to develop new programming that addressed solutions to social justice issues,” Lopez said.
Loyola’s program seeks to recruit students from all over the U.S., including Puerto Rico. But at the outset, recruitment focused on states with large Latino populations. Loyola was also fortunate in that its social work school already had several full-time and adjunct professors who were bilingual and bicultural and committed to the program.
Lopez said the $1 million grant also allowed Loyola to hire bilingual support staff specifically to serve the online bilingual cohort—including a full-time internship coordinator, a marketing and recruitment specialist, a full-time counselor, and part-time internship liaisons.
Spanish-speaking social work graduates have a definite edge when it comes to finding work, she said, especially in “communities with large Spanish-speaking populations where language barriers can hinder effective service delivery.”
“Their language skills enable them to bridge communication gaps, build trust, and provide culturally sensitive care to clients,” she said. “As for salary, while having a degree in social work can lead to higher earning potential, it is important to note that pay can vary depending on factors such as experience, location, and the specific organization or sector.”
For instance, Lopez said, state agencies and larger organizations may have the ability to offer enhanced pay for Spanish-speaking applicants, but smaller and rural agencies may not. At the very least, being bilingual would enable applicants to negotiate for higher pay than their monolingual counterparts.
Rangel, who moved to the United States 30 years ago, dreamed of being a psychologist when she worked in a factory for many years after arriving here. She finally was able to enroll in an undergraduate program in psychology in 2016. In 2021, Rangel entered Loyola’s bilingual MSW program after discovering that social work would still allow her to be a counselor and offer many other career options as well.
As part of her job, Rangel is doing the same thing she did during her internship: counseling Spanish-speaking students in middle school and high school, many of whom are refugees who recently arrived in this country. Rangel said she even got a second job offer but turned it down. She is now completing the 3,000 hours of counseling required to become an LCSW.
Now that she’s living her dream, Rangel wants to stay in the Chicago area and help members of her community. Rangel said being bilingual, sharing the same culture as her clients, and having lived the immigrant experience herself enables her to be more effective in her job.
“I feel like being in this program … has given me all the tools I need to get close to this community,” she said. “After doing my master’s, I better understand the importance of connecting with the individual by language or by knowing the culture. We understand better. We know the background. And we can connect better.”
She provides counseling in Spanish, which helps her build a strong rapport with clients who may otherwise eschew therapy because of what Rangel called the stigma against mental health in the Latin community.
The bilingual program also helped Rangel in another way. “This program and all these experiences helped me empower myself as a Latina woman.”
Connecticut Adelante
Like Rangel, Arriaga wants to stay in her native Hartford and serve the members of her community once she graduates with an MSW that includes the Connecticut Adelante (Connecticut Forward) program.
She said she loved the work she did during the internship—visiting the homes of her fellow Puerto Ricans in the Hartford area to provide individual and group counseling and connect them to various social services.
When she was younger, Rangel aspired to go to law school and work in the social justice field, but she re-evaluated her career goals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Once I started looking into it, I realized how much more (an MSW) aligned with the type of work I wanted to do than pursuing a track in law,” Arriaga said. “I love where I am from. I love my home. I would like to be the help that I wish I could have (had) as a kid growing up here. And that’s really what I would like to do. I would like to stay here and work in my hometown and work with families that are just like mine.”
She’s not ruling out law school at some point, which would enable her to pair her social work experience with legal training to serve her community even more effectively.
“We have a huge Spanish speaking population here and I don’t think there are enough Spanish-speaking workers to meet the need. So that would definitely be a priority for me and just the reason I’m doing the program Adelante—to make sure that I am well prepared to go into the community and serve the families in the best way possible,” Arriaga said.
Connecticut Adelante is newer than Loyola’s online program, having launched in fall 2023 with grant funding from a state organization called Connecticut Health Horizons, a three-year, $35 million initiative that in turn received money from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan.
People may not consider Connecticut an immigration hotspot, but it is. In fact, Hartford’s population is 46% Latino. It has long been home to a large Puerto Rican community. A diverse group of immigrants also is moving into the area, said Milagros Marrero-Johnson, MSW, director of strategic programming at UConn’s School of Social Work, who oversees Connecticut Adelante.
Given how few of them there are, Spanish-speaking social workers across Connecticut are invariably burned out, Marrero-Johnson said.
“Some are leaving the workforce, some are leaving community organizations and social service agencies to go into private practice, which then again leaves the gap of not having enough social workers,” Marrero-Johnson said.
It’s not just a matter of being able to speak Spanish or having an interpreter present to translate a clients’ words into English for the monolingual social worker’s benefit. What’s key is building relationships and trust with Spanish-speaking clients—making an “authentic emotional connection,” she said.
With that in mind, Connecticut Adelante—like Loyola’s online bilingual social work program— recruits those with advanced, if not native-level, Spanish language skills.
Applicants selected for Connecticut Adelante receive $10,000 scholarships and study the same curriculum as non-Spanish speakers pursuing the individuals, groups and families track. However, Connecticut Adelante students take four courses in English and Spanish while increasingly covering the course content in Spanish over time in each class, Marrero-Johnson said. Like at Loyola, Connecticut Adelante students must complete two practicums to graduate.
When asked to explain why they want to be part of Connecticut Adelante, many applicants say they’ve been waiting for a program like this, one that would allow them to learn in their native language and give back to their communities.
“Which is phenomenal, because that’s what we want,” Marrero-Johnson said.
Her challenge now is to ramp up recruitment for future cohorts of Connecticut Adelante students and find funding sources to continue the program once the American Rescue Plan funding dries up.
Meanwhile, Arriaga is finding Connecticut Adelante immensely helpful. She says her bilingual skills and the training she’s receiving at UConn are invaluable in building connections with the families she works with.
“It plays such a huge role in the trust and the rapport that you build with the client. I find that there’s a level of comfort there that’s really nice,” said Arriaga, who’s pursuing her MSW part-time and will take three years to graduate. “It’s been such a great experience to be in people’s houses. I always say you need to meet people where they’re at and there’s no better place to meet them than at their homes.”
Raju Chebium is a writer in Maryland. Previously, he was a journalist for the Associated Press, CNN.com and Gannett/USA Today.
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