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Human Services BS

College of Community Studies and Public Affairs / Human Services
Undergraduate major / Bachelor of Science

About The Program

The Human Services major (BS) is for students preparing for a career as helping professionals, broadly trained to provide direct service, advocacy and coordination of services.

Students complete nine core four-credit classes (36 credits), sixteen elective credits in areas such as violence prevention, family studies, disability studies or aging studies, and a 160-hour practicum at a community-based agency. This coursework and community experience is designed to prepare professionally and culturally competent students who integrate theory and practice in order to effectively deliver human services.

The flexible, student-centered curriculum emphasizes advocacy, social justice, empowerment and a strengths-based approached.

Student outcomes

Students will:

  • deliver best-practices human services that meet the needs of the multi-cultural communities they serve.
  • use quality data to inform decision making.
  • communicate effectively in all relationships.

Related minors

How to enroll

Current students: Declare this program

Once you’re admitted as an undergraduate student and have met any further admission requirements your chosen program may have, you may declare a major or declare an optional minor.

Future students: Apply now

Apply to Metropolitan State: Start the journey toward your Human Services BS now. Learn about the steps to enroll or, if you have questions about what Metropolitan State can offer you, request information, visit campus or chat with an admissions counselor.

Get started on your Human Services BS

Courses and Requirements

SKIP TO COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Prerequisites

This course is an introduction to the sociological perspective. Students examine the social processes that shape societies and the course of their histories. The social nature of biographies is explored through the study of the family and socialization, education and work, bureaucracy and the economy, gender, social class, and race and ethnicity.

Full course description for Introduction to Sociology

Requirements (57 credits)

+ Core Classes

This non-credit workshop is for students who declare a major in Human Services or Alcohol and Drug Counseling. It facilitates the process of completing a background check through the Minnesota Department of Human Services. All students in these majors must complete a background check by their second semester as a declared HSER BS, BHS, or ADC major. These majors require a practicum and practicum sites have set standards for background check results. Payment for the background check to the Minnesota Department of Human Services is the responsibility of the student. Results of the background check are sent to the student and to the background check administrator at Metropolitan State University's academic Department of Human Services. Results can be used to guide the student's course of study.

Full course description for Background Check Workshop

This course introduces students to basic counseling skills to be used with clients dealing with a variety of issues including family challenges and substance use disorders. As such, it is designed to help students develop essential helping skills needed for client engagement, follow-through, completion and overall therapeutic effectiveness. It includes examination and practice Person-Centered Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing, techniques central to helping others across a range of issues including substance use disorders. Specific skills covered include developing rapport, building empathy and active listening, encouraging trust, self-disclosure, immediacy, questioning and evoking, addressing discrepancies, etc. This course is highly experiential in its format. Students will participate in classroom exercises, role plays, and video-taping and self-assessment of counseling skills.

Full course description for Counseling and Interviewing Skills

This course teaches the dynamics of group counseling to be used with clients dealing with a variety of issues including family challenges and substance use disorders. Course includes examination and practice of Person-Centered Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing techniques central to helping others across a range of issues including substance use disorders. Students learn the skills of group counseling in a classroom and Training group experience. Topics include stages of group, group rules and goals, group leader skills, and types of groups. Students learn writing and charting skills necessary to document client progress. Emphasis is on interaction among group members, the counselors¿ role in group facilitating, and techniques to help group members learn to view their own behavior for self-awareness and self-disclosure.

Full course description for Group Counseling

This course is designed to teach the crisis intervention concepts and counseling skills used in helping individuals in crisis situations, including batterings, sexual assaults, suicide attempts, drug overdoses, psychiatric emergencies and family crises. The course includes role-playing exercises. Evaluations are based in part on performance and growth in the role-playing segments. Overlap: HSER 360 Crisis Intervention Theory Seminar.

Full course description for Crisis Intervention/Caring for Trauma through the Lifecourse

This course emphasizes the experience of race and racism and how both intersect with various forms of human diversity in the helping arena. It will provide students an understanding of how power and privilege are operant in the human services. Students will examine assumptions, myths, beliefs, and biases that block effective relationships between groups of people and that hamper helper-helpee dynamics. Course activities involve self-assessment and opportunities for application of learning in a human service environment. COMPETENCE STATEMENT: Knows conceptual frameworks dealing with racial-ethnic identity, racial-cultural world views, oppression and power well enough to explore, develop, and evaluate personal responses and professional strategies to eliminate the myths, beliefs, biases, actions and efforts, that sustain social oppression in the helping professions.

Full course description for Intersection of Race and Diversity in Human Services

This course comes at the end of the student's senior course work in human services. Students complete a human services portfolio assignment demonstrating what they have learned in human services over the period of time while studying in this program. This assignment helps students to reflect on their academic course of study (both theoretical and practical) and how it applies to the professional practice of human services. The written portfolio provides evidence of competence and is a way for students to demonstrate readiness for graduation and work as Human Services professionals. In order to complete the portfolio assignment students must complete at least ten (10) hours of community service in a Human Services Agency with a Human Services professional. The course culminates with students giving presentations on the agency studied and written about in their portfolio.

Full course description for Human Services Capstone Seminar

+ Research Requirement (4 credits)

Choose one of the following two courses

It is important for human service practitioners to understand the relationship between practice and research. According to social psychologist, Kurt Lewin, the best practice is founded in research and the best research is grounded in practice. Acknowledging this insight, this course will engage students in an examination of research as it is employed in the human service field. The primary focus of this course is to teach students how to be critical consumers of research, able to read, evaluate, and apply research for human service practice purposes. A second purpose is to develop students skills for their future role as collaborators with researchers in generating knowledge from the field. This course can serve as a companion course for the program evaluation offering or a foundations course for students interested in pursuing graduate study or a preview course for those intending to take social or behavioral science research methods courses.

Full course description for Understanding and Using Research for the Practitioner

This course focuses on the knowledge and skills needed to appropriately identify, collect, analyze and report evaluative information to be used in making decisions about, and changes in, programs. Topics include approaches to program evaluation, the process of planning and conducting an evaluation, basic principles and practices of designing evaluation instruments, and methods for interpreting and presenting data with an emphasis on providing relevant information to decision makers. This course is appropriate for anyone in business, public, nonprofit or human services administration who is responsible for making decisions about service programs or for conducting evaluations.

Full course description for Program Evaluation

+ Practica (5 credits)

Experiential (practica) learning opportunities are an essential component of the human services degree program. Thus, every student is required to complete a practicum experience.

+ Specialty Areas

Take one course in each of the five specialty areas. Five courses in a single concentration area comprises a minor in that area.

1. Aging Studies/Gerontology

This course, designed for students in human services fields who work with older adults and their families, and students considering gerontology as a vocation, is an overview of the field. Topics include understanding the physiological, psychological, and sociological aspects of aging, as well as the myths about aging, health and social needs of the aging, and community resources and programs.

Full course description for Aging in America: A Personal and Societal Journey

2. Violence Prevention and Intervention (HSVP 300 and HSVP 301 are required for a minor)

This course examines causes and underlying factors that account for violence in American Society. Students examine the extent, causes and challenges of violence in today's society. For those students who work in the human services field, this course prepares them to identify and critique methods and strategies for addressing violence. It may be taken alone or as the first of three core courses required for the community violence prevention minor. Prerequisite: Courses in psychology or sociology.

Full course description for Violence: Origins and Explanations

This course addresses how violence is responded to at various levels. It examines the role and development of personal skills and involvement in addressing violence, community intervention resources, systems responses such as punishment and rehabilitation in violence prevention, social change movement responses to violence, and international violence and the growth of human rights movements.

Full course description for Violence: Individual, Community and Global Responses

This course examines gender violence in its multiple forms from a global perspective. An introduction to the history of violence against women, current theories and research on the causes of violence in intimate relationships, past and current responses, and interventions and prevention models to address this worldwide problem will be discussed. Understanding the multiple approaches for addressing gender violence will provide students the knowledge to describe culturally competent intervention and prevention strategies.

Full course description for Gender Violence in Global Perspective

This course is designed as an introduction to the study of family violence across the lifespan. It will introduce students to history, current theories, research, and policies in the three areas of family violence: child maltreatment, elder abuse, domestic violence. You will examine the cultural, social and political roots of family violence, as well as the dynamics of abuse in the family and in intimate relationships. You will explore the effects of abuse at the individual, family, and community levels, and be able to identify abusive and controlling behaviors. The content of the course focuses on current theories, research and policies on domestic violence (battering, sexual assault, stalking), child maltreatment (physical and sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect) and abuse of vulnerable adults (elderly, non-elderly vulnerable populations). This course is an introduction to the topic. It will give students a basic overview of the issues across types of family violence…

Full course description for Family Violence Across the Lifespan

This course explores the connections between violence and disability. It investigates how models of disability affect the understanding of violence and abuse of people with disabilities as well as the response to such violence. The focus is on the lived experiences of people with disabilities who have experienced violence and abuse, and how systems and policies have aided or hindered successful interventions. The course also explores how being a victim of violence can affect a person's disability status and the implications of such a connection for policymakers, human services workers, and people with disabilities themselves. The course employs the socio-ecological model of violence prevention and challenges students to apply this model to case studies.

Full course description for Violence and Disability

3. Family Studies (HSFS 343 is required for a minor)

This course introduces students to the major social and psychological theories employed in studying family processes and in studying how families function in society today. In addition, the course engages students in an examination of their own families. Key features of this course are that students do a modified social history and case study of their own families. Students demonstrate competence by applying the content of the course in their analysis of their own family's social/psychological analysis.

Full course description for The Family: A Social/Psychological Exploration

This course explores the dynamics and processes of family interactions and counseling from the viewpoint of a family counselor. Some of the major theories of family counseling are discussed, with particular emphasis on the theories of Virginia Satir. Evaluation is based in part on a final conference with the instructor. This course is designed for students seeking self-understanding, as well as for students pursuing careers in the human services.

Full course description for Family Counseling

This course familiarizes students with the diversity that exists in families. It is intended for students who want to gain a better understanding of the family, and for students specializing in psychology or human services related fields. Structural inequalities in society based on wealth, race/ethnicity and gender are presented as key determinants in the diversity of family forms and in differing experiences within families.

Full course description for Family: Racial, Gender and Class Dimensions

This course considers the impact of public choices on life within families. It is generally offered during the state legislative session in order to give students opportunity to participate in the legislative process. The policy issues covered vary from year to year. Topics may cover competing rights of children and parents, culturally-specific/friendly family policy, international family policy comparisons, and other family policy issues.

Full course description for Issues and Actions in Family Policy

Until recently, the worlds of family and work were seen as separate spheres. Today, people are aware of the many possible relationships between work and family in society. This course examines the challenges, issues and problems associated with a variety of contemporary work-family patterns including single-provider, dual-provider and single-parent families, and families who own their own businesses.

Full course description for Work and Family

This interdisciplinary course explores historical and contemporary aspects of children's status and roles in family and society, adults' relationships and functions in relation to children, and public policy affecting children in twentieth-century United States. Community and experience-based learning, including a student-designed project, augment class lectures and discussion.

Full course description for Children in U.S. Society

This course explores sexual values and behaviors as they are developed and expressed across the life cycle of the family in different social cultural contexts. Students will examine human sexuality in the context of family relationships and dynamics while also learning to identify and evaluate effective programs, strategies, and materials for sexuality education. The course focuses on such topics as family planning, pregnancy and childbirth, gender identity and roles, sexual function and dysfunction, sexual pleasure, sexual variation, sexual orientation, sexuality and disability, sexuality and chronic disease, and sexual development. The course content and practice skills will satisfy a requirement for Certified Family Life Educator (CFLE) credentialing.

Full course description for Sexuality and the Family

This course is designed as an introduction to the study of family violence across the lifespan. It will introduce students to history, current theories, research, and policies in the three areas of family violence: child maltreatment, elder abuse, domestic violence. You will examine the cultural, social and political roots of family violence, as well as the dynamics of abuse in the family and in intimate relationships. You will explore the effects of abuse at the individual, family, and community levels, and be able to identify abusive and controlling behaviors. The content of the course focuses on current theories, research and policies on domestic violence (battering, sexual assault, stalking), child maltreatment (physical and sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect) and abuse of vulnerable adults (elderly, non-elderly vulnerable populations). This course is an introduction to the topic. It will give students a basic overview of the issues across types of family violence…

Full course description for Family Violence Across the Lifespan

4. Disability Studies 

Disability Awareness provides opportunities for students in all fields of study to increase their awareness of the barriers, attitudes and successes relevant to individuals with disabilities in society as a whole. This course does not focus on specific medical definitions, conditions or types of disabilities. Instead, the course concentrates on a brief history of the treatment of people with disabilities, disability rights, etiquette, work, sports and art related to disabilities.

Full course description for Disability Awareness

Introduction to disabilities prepares students who desire to learn about and potentially work in the field of disabilities. Using a diversity model and social perspective approach, students learn about issues common to persons with diverse disabilities. Perspectives of disabilities that recognize disability as a culture and acknowledge the potential and capabilities of persons with disabilities are offered. Course materials include definitions, psychosocial considerations and societal perspectives.

Full course description for Introduction to Disabilities

Disability Rights: History and Current Trends traces the history, policies, and individual and group empowerment efforts that led to the formation of the disability rights movement. Key legislation including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Rehabilitation Act, and education acts are examined. Future trends in disability policies and civil rights are also explored. The challenges and struggles that persons with disabilities have fought to change in order to gain independence, respect, and opportunities are studied through American perspectives of disability history.

Full course description for Disability Rights: History and Current Trends

Community Resources and Services for People with Disabilities employs a two-fold approach to learning about resources that people with disabilities use. The course provides an overview of public and non-profit resources that provide services for a diverse range of disabilities. In addition to learning about resources, students critically examine agency functions including how well these resources promote independence and inclusion in society for people with disabilities. Advocacy skills that promote self-determination relevant to people with disabilities is also a focus in this course.

Full course description for Community Resources and Services for Persons with Disabilities

This course examines the historical perspectives, social policies, resources, and culture of persons belonging to the Blind, DeafBlind, or Deaf Culture. It is recognized that persons who are Blind, DeafBlind, or Deaf each have a unique history and culture. The course materials include major writings in comprehensive modules. These materials provide perspectives on the significant culture, civil rights movements, and empowerment of persons who are Blind, DeafBlind, and of the Deaf-World.

Full course description for Blind, Deaf Blind, and Deaf Culture, History and Resources

The aging of persons with disabilities is a new phenomenon due to improved health and advances that have increased their life-span. In addition, the aging of the baby-boomers is increasing the population of persons acquiring disabilities as they age. Is our society prepared to meet the needs of both groups? How can we prepare to assist all older persons in maintaining quality of life as they age? The need for collaboration across disability and aging networks to analyze these questions is a focus of this course.

Full course description for Aging and Disabilities

This course explores the connections between violence and disability. It investigates how models of disability affect the understanding of violence and abuse of people with disabilities as well as the response to such violence. The focus is on the lived experiences of people with disabilities who have experienced violence and abuse, and how systems and policies have aided or hindered successful interventions. The course also explores how being a victim of violence can affect a person's disability status and the implications of such a connection for policymakers, human services workers, and people with disabilities themselves. The course employs the socio-ecological model of violence prevention and challenges students to apply this model to case studies.

Full course description for Violence and Disability

5. Leadership and Administration

This course, designed for those planning careers in human services administration, provides insight into some of the common problems and concerns of management in a human services agency. Students use actual case studies to focus on examples of organizational planning, community relations, the decision-making process and personnel management. Overlap: HSA 360 Health Care Management and Supervision I and HSA 362T Human Service Administration Theory Seminar.

Full course description for Human Services Leadership and Administration

This course aims to introduce common, and sometimes complex, processes used to fund nonprofit organizations and government entities. Students will understand the rationale behind third-party funding, through readings, demonstrations, and guests in the classroom. Working in teams and individually, students will produce a program plan, budget, and proposal. Whether the student is a professional or advocate, funding is essential to human services, health, education and many other sectors. The course will equip students from all disciplines with the necessary skills to sustain their programs.

Full course description for Program Planning, Budgeting, Proposal Writing and Funding

This course provides an overview of organization development principles necessary for any type of organization to effectively cope and react to inevitable change that will impact organizational effectiveness and survival. Addresses the theory and practice or organizational development including: initial diagnosis, entry, contracting, data collection, data analysis, action planning, approaches to implementing planned change, and evaluation of planned change effectiveness. Today, every manager, at any level, must be capable of dealing with certain change in a proactive manner.

Full course description for Organizational Development and Change

This course examines causes and underlying factors of interpersonal conflict in human interactions. The course covers principles and techniques to diagnose conflict, develops an understanding of issues causing conflict, differentiates between various types of conflict, explores the variety of forces and factors which push conflict in a productive or dysfunctional direction, and develops personal skills to influence outcomes to the inevitable conflict situations one encounters in one's personal and professional lives.

Full course description for Conflict Resolution

This course is for students who want to learn how to design training and teach adults in an organizational setting. Students develop an understanding of the role and impact of training in helping organizations reach objectives. Topics include adult learning theory, needs assessment, instructional design, media selection and how to present training content to different audiences.

Full course description for Organizational Training and Staff Development

Students confront complex ethical and moral issues in their professional and personal lives. In this course, students study and apply the cultural, social, legal, economic, theological and philosophical bases for making such decisions. Each student learns to articulate coherent arguments involving at least two divergent views of many current ethical issues confronted in human services today. Students select, research and present an individual project on a major ethical issue relevant to their professional interests in human services.

Full course description for Ethical Issues in Human Services

+ Electives

This course will explore working in community as a form of civic engagement and an arena of human service work. This is typically referred to as community practice. Community practice, whether by the volunteer or the professional, entails helping a community at-large solve its problems and achieve its goals. Insightful, grounded community practice enables helpers to impact the total milieu of peoples lives, improving the broader spectrum of peoples lives in ways that direct client-centered helping cannot. Through the theoretical component of the course students will examine different ideologies of helping and how those become expressed in various forms of community helping including: service, organizing and development, social change and empowerment, and advocacy. Through the experiential component of the course students will become familiar with the varied tools of this distinctive type of helping within a specific Twin Cities social movement. This course is presently designed…

Full course description for Working with/in Community

This course is designed to be an overview of the practice of Alcohol and Drug Counseling. It covers the main theories or models which explain what chemical dependency is. It also provides a survey of the practice of alcohol and drug counseling, including history, licensure requirements, 12 core functions, continuum of services, culture, evidence-based practices, laws, ethics and professionalism. An orientation to the Alcohol and Drug major will also be provided.

Full course description for Introduction to Substance Use Disorders