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About SSA

The School of Social Service Administration

The School of Social Service Administration (SSA) prepares students to become leaders in the field of social work. SSA offers graduate work leading to both the A.M. and the Ph.D. degrees.

  • The Master's Program prepares students to enter advanced professional practice. The curriculum includes: the core curriculum, which offers all students a solid introduction to the fundamentals of direct practice with individuals, families, organizations, and communities and to the fundamentals of administration and policy in their first two quarters; an elective concentration in either clinical practice or social administration; and, field placements to supplement both the core and the concentrations.
  • The Doctoral Program offers specialized study at a more advanced level. Each student's program unique and features course work (including courses in related disciplines taught by other units of the University), independent study, and research leading to the dissertation. 

Learn More about SSA

The Historical Context

SSA is one of a handful of institutions that has helped create and define the profession of social work and the field of social welfare in this century. SSA's first leaders were activists in the Chicago settlement house movement, one of the main strands in what eventually became social work. Graham Taylor, who organized SSA's predecessor, the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, was a social gospel minister and founder of the settlement house, Chicago Commons; Sophonisba Breckinridge, Grace and Edith Abbott, and Julia Lathrop, the women who shaped SSA into an institution of national importance, had lived and worked at Jane Addams' Hull House.

While most early schools of social work concentrated on practical training for caseworkers, SSA's leaders insisted on the need for a solid foundation in social science and social research as well. In its first decade, The Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy faculty and students were investigating such issues as juvenile delinquency, truancy, vocational training, and housing in the rapidly growing city of Chicago. The decision in 1920 to merge the School and the University of Chicago opened students to contact with the social sciences. SSA's first requirements insisted that a student demonstrate a "good foundation in the social sciences."

In the decades since then, the emphases on social research and on applying the insights of social science to solving human problems have continued. Crucial to that effort has been the Social Service Review founded in 1927 with the aim of opening "scientific discussions of problems arising in connection with the various aspects of social work." Like SSA itself, the Social Service Review has not only reflected the social welfare field but helped to shape it. It remains the premier journal in its field.

Early research at SSA had a distinct public policy cast. Investigations of the status of mothers and children, for example, laid the foundations for the child-related provisions of the nation's Social Security System in the 1930s. Beginning in the 1940s, SSA energies turned to issues in the social work profession itself. Such faculty members as Charlotte Towle and Helen Harris Perlman applied the insights of ego psychology to casework, and developed the generic casework curriculum, which became a model for social work education. Recent contributions to the direct practice tradition have included the application of behavior modification to casework and the development of the task-centered approach. The School is thus in the unique position of having been a pioneer both in policy research and in the development of innovative methods of social work practice.

SSA today continues to establish the connections between the social and behavioral sciences, research, and the real world of policy and practice. The faculty is drawn both from social work and from such related fields as law, economics, psychology, human development, and sociology. Research at the School reflects this diversity. Current projects investigate social work interventions with such groups as teenaged mothers, older adults, and adolescent street gang members; examine comparative treatments of depression; evaluate child welfare services; explore the social cognitive development of children in deprived environments; and analyze family supportive policies in the workplace.

SSA faculty have been honored as White House Fellows, Fulbright Fellows, and Kellogg Fellows. They have strong ties both to public and private welfare agencies and to local, state, and national governments. Among them, for example, is a former division chief of the Bureau of the Budget and a former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Faculty members have contributed their expertise to long lists of national and state commissions on such topics as juvenile justice, mental health, aging, and child welfare.

The University Context

"We were clear in Chicago that only in a university, and only in a great university, could a school of social work get the educational facilities that advanced professional students must have if they were to become the efficient public servants of democracy."
-- Edith Abbott, SSA's first Dean

The University of Chicago is one of the foremost institutions in the country; the School of Social Service Administration has both benefited from and contributed to its special strengths. The University has a strong emphasis on graduate and professional education. It has a fruitful tradition of encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. And among its strongest divisions have always been the behavioral and social sciences, which, in the tradition of the "Chicago School," have combined attention to social theory with concern for the pressing real-world problems of an urban society.

Several faculty members of the School of Social Service Administration hold joint appointments in other departments and committees. SSA students are encouraged to take advantage of the resources of the University. They do this by taking courses (currently students are enrolled in courses in health administration, business, history, sociology, economics, and psychology), as well as by making informal contacts. Other students choose joint degree programs SSA has established with the Graduate School of Business and the Divinity School.

The Chicago Context

The broader context is Chicago, and it is an irresistible context for the student of social welfare. Chicago has been the center of pioneering movements in social work, community organizing, women's rights, urban planning and architecture, labor organizing, and black politics. Through Chicago's leadership, Illinois was the first state to pass a Mother's Pension Act (forerunner of AFDC) and the first to create a Juvenile Court. A list of its movers and shakers would include not only Cyrus McCormick, Montgomery Ward, and Richard J. Daley, but also Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, Julia Lathrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bertha Palmer, Clarence Darrow, Gail Cincotta, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. Chicago confronts the major issues facing American cities in such areas as economic development, public education, and the political empowerment of minorities, and its efforts are watched by other cities throughout the country.

After a century of immigration, the city's people are extraordinarily diverse. The city and metropolitan area support a vigorous cultural life whose chief glories are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Art Institute, the Lyric Opera, a distinguished literary tradition, a nationally hailed theatrical scene, and the finest urban architecture and contemporary blues and jazz music in America.

SSA has both benefited from Chicago's vitality and played its own part in Chicago activism. Julius Rosenwald, an early president of Sears Roebuck and one of the School's founding trustees, established scholarships for two African American students with the specification that they do their fieldwork among the city's early African-American community on the West Side. In the years since then, students and faculty have studied and worked in Chicago's ethnic communities, its housing projects, its criminal justice reform movements, and other social experiments. Students who come to study at SSA thus have access to an extraordinary community.

View a video about SSA's impact on Chicago: SSA: Transforming Chicago Through 100 Years of Scholarship and Service