The Council on Social Work Education has accredited 470 baccalaureate social work programs in the United States as of February 2011. It maintains responsibility for developing accreditation standards for social work education and ensuring that programs meet them as recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
Like most other majors, a bachelor's degree in social work typically requires completion of about 120 semester hours with most programs requiring at least 40 hours in the major. Properly accredited programs provide courses in social welfare policy, social work practice and human behavior in the social environment and research and field education as well as courses in related fields such as psychology and sociology. Specific courses include those on human behavior, social research, social work methods and the social environment.
Most accredited programs require supervised field experience outside of the classroom such as in an internship or some other type of experiential education. Because all states require field experience -- as many as 3,000 hours -- before a social worker can be licensed, this helps students get closer to licensure, but it also follows the philosophy that experience is the best teacher. Schools offering a bachelor's degree in social work typically mandate around 400 hours of field experience that can be completed in various ways including at an institution or in casework through a school-managed program.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, social workers held about 642,000 jobs in 2008. Just over half of these were in health care and social assistance industries. About 31 percent were employed in government agencies. The bureau projected "faster than the average" job growth with the need for social workers increasing by 16 percent between 2008 and 2018.