Students share their experiences of "placement poverty", which is when mandatory, unpaid placements push them into financial stress and sometimes out of their studies.
Like thousands of other nursing students, Victoria Robinson needs to complete more than 800 hours of unpaid work placements to graduate.
Current students like Victoria have shared their stories with the ABC, saying the status quo is exploitative, and inflicting significant mental and financial pain.
Kate's already dealing with the crippling cost of living, so dropping paid work for an unpaid placement requires financial help from three generations of her family.
"I'm taking a full year off, which means that I won't be finished until somewhere around 2027 — possibly even later, if I continue to study part-time, which is what I've been doing … so that I can pay rent," he said.
James is a founding member of advocacy group Students Against Placement Poverty, which he said had been inundated with stories from young people across the country in significant stress.
Some students were having to stay in abusive partnerships or go back to unhealthy family situations to save money to do their placements, he added.
The original article contains 944 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Literally every uni in Australia requires it, but not for every degree. Teaching and medicine are the two that come immediately to mind for me. From the article, it seems like social work also requires a sort of prac.
Interesting... I studied software development at Swinburne (2008-2011) and every student in the course did a one year work placement in year 3. It was paid about 3/4 the salary of a graduate job.
Germany used to get youngsters (whether students or not) to spend time in either military or community service (often overseas). I think in both cases living expenses were covered .