An Assessment of Social Work Education Efforts to Recruit and Retain MSW Students of Color

ABSTRACT

Social work programs in the United States (N=74) were investigated to determine strategies used for recruiting and retaining MSW students of color. Most schools had student populations exceeding 25,000 and combined BSW, MSW, and PhD programs. Data were collected using a Graduate Recruitment and Retention Scale with corresponding and acceptably stable subscales (alpha coefficients=.86 and .83, respectively). Long-term and durable problems were revealed vis-à-vis graduate student diversity, and few significant differences existed between public and private MSW program student diversity efforts. One exception was personalized follow-up to inquiries about application processes (p=0.01). Public or private status did not predict student diversity efforts in recruitment (Lambda [20, 35]=0.542, p>0.05, partial eta squared=0.458) or retention (Lambda [13, 50]=0.865, p>0.05, partial eta squared=0.135).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stan L. Bowie

Stan L. Bowie is Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ayat J. J. Nashwan is Assistant Professor at Yarmouk University. Veliska Thomas is Instructor at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Virtual Academic Center. Renski J. Davis-Buckley is Office Manager at Roach & Mitchell, Houston, Texas. Richard L. Johnson is a Family Readiness Support Administrator for the U.S. Department of Defense in Detroit, Michigan, and doctoral student at University of New England.