The USC School of Social Work will graduate 1,824 Master of Social Work students this Friday, including four who will also receive a Master of Business Administration, the largest number ever for this dual-degree option.

Rachel Pedowitz, Clotilde Dedecker, R. Michael Shackel and Jay Lytton are part of a growing group of individuals seeking ways to join the analytical side of business with the human side of social work. Coupled with a higher demand for corporate social workers, the MSW/MBA dual degree has gained popularity and spurred new career options for leaders who understand human behavior and want to build positive relationships — within their companies and their communities.

“The MSW/MBA is definitely an unusual, unique combination. It is a testament to USC allowing students to pursue unique paths and unusual courses of study,” Dedecker said. “USC has had a really strong tradition in multidisciplinary academic pathways. When you’re opened to a multidisciplinary approach to studying, you’re opened to alternative career pathways as well.”

MSW/MBA dual-degree students take an accelerated schedule of courses concurrently in the School of Social Work and USC Marshall School of Business to earn both master’s degrees in less time than would be required if each degree were pursued independently.

MSW/MBA students must choose the School of Social Work’s Community, Organization, and Business Innovation (COBI) department of study where they learn about organizational leadership and development, cultural diversity and inclusion, corporate social responsibility, grant writing, policy advocacy and social change. They also learn how to resolve conflicts in work groups, help employees manage work-life balance and interpret labor policies.

“Our purpose is to address innovation in social work practice with communities, organizations and business throughout our curriculum and the research that is conducted in our department,” said Michalle Mor Barak, dean’s professor of social work and business and chair of the COBI department. “We teach an innovative skill set to our students in our practice courses that include applying social work principles, values and ethics in community and business settings, as well as applying business principles to human service and nonprofit organizations.”

Thinking differently

COBI’s field placements include non-traditional social work positions at companies including Warner Brothers, Target and Wells Fargo, expanding the settings where social workers can work and students can practice skills.

“I’ve had really great working experience in school with both the MBA and the MSW,” Dedecker said. “I had an alternative field placement where I did consulting for startups; it’s a really interesting intersection. I got what I wanted in terms of having a good ecosystem of exploring what options were out there.”

Shackel pointed to the new COBI Fellows Program in Social Innovation as another unique learning opportunity for students to strengthen their professional skills, innovative thinking and leadership capabilities while collaborating with peers to enact social change.

“The Marshall School of Business acknowledges that people need to have emotional intelligence to be good managers, and the School of Social Work realizes that you also have to understand budgeting and some of the really key things to have a functioning organization,” Shackel said. “They are two separate worlds that are now moving closer together. You can see that in the COBI Fellows Program whose focus is social enterprise.”

The path to USC

Pedowitz, Dedecker, Shackel and Lytton will be joining thousands of USC students as they walk across the stage to receive their degrees.

And although their endings at USC will be similar, their beginnings were anything but.

Dedecker, a product of Harvard University, found the MSW/MBA program at USC after starting the female empowerment organization Circle of Women, while also performing administrative work for jewelry designer Joan Hornig’s nonprofit organization Philanthropy is Beautiful.

Following in Dedecker’s philanthropic footsteps, Shackel was heavily involved in Catholic Charities San Bernardino-Riverside, working alongside the organization’s CEO, who helped inspire his applying for the dual-degree program.

“He was an MSW and also an LCSW [licensed clinical social worker], and he had a lot of strengths because of that education. But he admitted that it would have been helpful if he had more of a financial background and business foundation that it takes to run an organization,” Shackel said.

Lytton, no stranger to the School of Social Work himself, has been familiar with the school since he was a boy, as his aunt is faculty member Heather Halperin.

A human development major at University of California, Davis, Lytton held a bevy of jobs after graduation, from a four-year internship at the UC Davis Mind Institute to a job teaching English in a suburb of Madrid, Spain.

Prior to USC, Pedowitz studied public health and psychology as an undergraduate and worked for two years before returning to school. Her time at a pediatric hospital and an emergency shelter inspired her interest in the business side of public health.

“I was doing a lot of data analysis, being exposed to hospital administration, which is probably where the interest and realization that I could do an MBA came from,” she said. “I just happened to be stationed at an emergency shelter, which is in foster care, and that for me was a huge game changer; it completely opened my eyes to the level of need in the foster care system, and it really made me want to stay in that world.”

Balancing act

The MSW/MBA program will allow her to do just that. Although business and social work offer contrasting values and teachings, the dual degree allows students to comprehend the world in both a qualitative and quantitative sense.

“The MBA is all about analysis, and the MSW is all about synthesis.,” Pedowitz said. “I think both ways of thinking have their place.”

Lytton, along with the other graduates, agreed that adding the mathematical side to social work is imperative to understanding the bigger picture.

“I think the direction which social work needs to be looking at is not psychological synthesis, but how do you really focus on fundamental program evaluation,” he said. “Evaluating information from large data sets of millions of clients and making clinical decisions for an entire population and being able to predict what is going to happen...Moving towards a quantitative focus is critical.”