Why university education matters: Youth work and the Australian experience

In many countries youth work education in the university confronts a precarious future. Paradoxically, this takes place as the labor market is unable to meet demands for qualified practitioners. This article makes a case for further investment in university-based youth work education. While presenting labor demand and supply arguments, we also suggest that a good university education is important for producing graduates capable of becoming experts and good practitioners in the Aristotelian sense of the word. This entails the provision of learning opportunities to attain specialist knowledge, technical expertise and ethical capacities of the kind that distinguish youth work practice from other approaches to work with young people. Such an education also promotes the prospect that practitioners are able to develop a professional habitus that advances youth work as a discrete field of professional practice. While the material used in this article is Australian, we suggest there are sufficient commonalities between the Australian experience and many other countries for the arguments, findings and recommendations made here to have more general applicability.