This story is a collaboration between San José Spotlight and Open Campus.
Genesis Smith is spread thin. There aren’t enough social workers in Silicon Valley, leaving her to juggle tense encounters with parents whose children have been placed in protective custody with hour-long drives as far as Merced to check on foster placements.
“If you love your job, you will never work a day in your life. I love my job. I look forward to work. But I’m not going to pretend it’s not emotionally draining,” Smith, a 25-year-old child welfare worker for Santa Clara County’s Department of Child and Family Services, told San José Spotlight. “We are definitely hiring.”
It’s been a year since Smith earned her master’s degree in social work from San Jose State University, long known for supplying talent to the world’s biggest tech firms. Recent graduate survey data suggests the majority are becoming software engineers. But as local tech growth slows and companies expand more rapidly elsewhere, California’s oldest public university is approaching a turning point.
Instead, it’s trying to better serve growing demand for health care and social services jobs, which have seen the largest growth in Silicon Valley compared to other fields over the past three years. By steering more graduates into roles directly serving their community — not tech giants — the university seeks to better cater to a region facing deep wealth divides, soaring housing costs and a fast-approaching elder population boom.
“We are the largest producer of engineers in Silicon Valley. But we are having high-level discussions about jobs like teaching and social work that are crucial for society, but don’t tend to be highly paid,” Melinda Jackson, dean of undergraduate education, told San José Spotlight. “Those are the kinds of jobs that can’t be outsourced to AI.”
A specific area of emphasis is the university’s School of Social Work, which sends future child welfare and adult protective services workers into a county where substance abuse has been declared a public health crisis and homelessness policies have made national headlines.
Many faculty members are active social workers in child welfare, adult and aging services and mental health. That’s been the case since the school’s inception, according to Peter Lee, a professor and director of San Jose State’s School of Social Work.
“The experts in the profession are often current social workers, and we regularly hire them to teach classes in specialized areas,” Lee told San José Spotlight.
Dozens of vacancies
But there’s a severe shortage of social workers throughout the state.
Santa Clara County has been hit hard.
In recent years, county social workers have spoken publicly about distressing working conditions due in part to understaffing. It comes as they’re grappling with the fallout of child welfare policies in light of the 2021 fentanyl overdose of an infant known as “Baby Phoenix.” The agency — under policies pushed by county lawyers — made headlines for refusing to separate the baby from a father struggling with substance abuse.
County leaders are looking for all the social workers they can get. The Board of Supervisors last November called for a comprehensive hiring campaign, as well as efforts to lobby state leaders to fund it.
Out of the 361 case-carrying social worker positions in the department of family and children’s services, 65 were vacant as of the end of last year, according to a county report in February. Meanwhile, the county has urgent needs for additional staffing in the department’s Emergency Response and Dependency Investigations unit, which assigns social workers to investigate allegations suggesting a child is at risk or in imminent danger.
There were 27 vacancies after recent hiring efforts moved the department closer to its goal of reaching no more than a 15% vacancy rate among its 130 total positions. Those recent hires needed to complete state and county-required training and will begin working with families this summer.
San Jose State has about 175 undergraduate majors and more than 450 graduate students in social work, and internship partnerships with about 500 agencies across California. Lee said San Jose State’s School of Social Work has the largest enrollment of any such program in the area.
Overcoming financial barriers
Jackson said San Jose State has taken other steps to steer students toward community-focused professions. She said the university is pursuing grant programs focused on attracting more men of color into teaching — a profession where this demographic is vastly underrepresented.
“Financial barriers are a big consideration,” Jackson said.
But grant and scholarship funding could prove more difficult in the coming years as the federal government under President Donald Trump eliminates programs that center on diversity, equity and inclusion.
“These are the kinds of programs that are coming under more scrutiny,” Jackson said, adding the university doesn’t have a large endowment and is being pushed to raise more money.
Smith said students already face major financial roadblocks in the social worker program, which requires students to work internships that are mostly unpaid. That creates a challenge in an area of the country where the cost of living outpaces wages. Students often need to take on additional paid work to get by, but don’t have enough time to do so.
“That was painful for everyone,” Smith told San José Spotlight. “The internship hours demanded so much from us and we were all broke all the time. That would be the one thing I’d say would stop people from doing it. That’s where it becomes an economic gap.”
Smith said she was lucky enough to live with her mother with low car payments and no rent.
“It really is not financially sustainable. I live on my own now so if I were to try and pay rent and go to school, I wouldn’t have done it,” she said.
Lee said his department is well aware of the issue — and has recently expanded some workforce training grants to make more progress. Those total more than $28 million.
However, the federal government recently cut funding for a Santa Clara County program aimed at filling a social worker shortage in high-need school districts, Lee said.
Jackson, the undergraduate dean, said internships can be a challenge for students across the board.
“Many of our students are first generation college students and may be working,” Jackson said. “They may have responsibilities at home. Caring for younger siblings. Family obligations.”
‘Hard conversations to have’
The roadblocks to a career in community service aren’t just financial. While in college, Smith felt tech jobs were more sought after among students than community jobs. It’s evident in the campus itself, she said.
“At San Jose State they built a whole science building. It’s amazing. There’s A/C in there. They’ve got windows. Their floors are shiny,” Smith said. “But you go into the social sciences building and they’re some of the oldest buildings on campus. The A/C is louder than the teacher. It’s 90 degrees there. Some of them don’t even have windows. There’s definitely a big disparity.”
But looks aren’t everything. She praised the hands-on experience the college gave her. Smith looks back fondly on the college’s social work simulation labs, where she would walk into full-set recreations of her future environment: A house with a couch, bed and bathroom. A hospital room with a bed, doctor and police officer.
“You do it in your last year — your last semester — about once a week for five or six weeks,” Smith said. “Social workers for the county will come and act out scenarios for us. They’ll pretend to be a parent and we have to learn how to talk to parents and how to get into the front door. Or when you have to visit someone at a hospital. Or when you have to attend a court hearing.”
Today, Smith finds her work profoundly impacted by these issues. Part of her job is to ask parents questions involving their economic status — whether they can provide their child enough food or housing stability.
“These are hard conversations to have when people can’t even afford a safe place to live,” she said.
San Jose State University finds itself a vessel for Silicon Valley’s state of flux. A Joint Venture Silicon Valley report on the 2024 local economy showed health care and social services jobs grew by 48,600 over the last two years — the largest of any other job sector. It’s a striking find in a region where, in recent decades, tech companies saw unimaginable growth. But the pandemic’s enabling of remote work opened people’s options on where to live — bypassing the region’s stratospheric housing costs.
“People are now saying, ‘huh – maybe it’s not worth it to be here,’” Russell Hancock, president and CEO of the research group, told San José Spotlight. “We’re living in a strange new world.”
San Jose State is undoubtedly populating a major share of the valley’s community service workers, Hancock said.
“Of course Stanford gets all the press,” Hancock said. “But their degree numbers are smaller than San Jose State, which has the critical mass. And the region doesn’t appreciate it nearly enough.”
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.
