Social welfare education in Korea began as the 4 year undergraduate program in 1947, well before the modern concept of social welfare came to have a social entity. Now after a long sustained rapid economic growth, explosion of higher education, and recent consolidation of social welfare system, social welfare has become one of the three largest social science majors in terms of the numbers of registered students in undergraduate programs in Korea today. This paper explicates the postwar history of social welfare education, which is construed as a product of continuous interactions among the institutional construction of social welfare, higher education policy and the identity of social welfare studies at a given point of historical time.
Periodization of its development is not an easy task. But here three stages have been identified; the first, years of Social Work Departments, from liberalization to 1960s. Social welfare institutions were meager, higher education was yet only for the elite, and social welfare education was modeled after the professional graduate education of social work of the United States. The second period is here called as the years of Social Welfare Departments, from the 1970s to the 1980s. The notion of social welfare began to have real entity particularly in the form of social insurances and other services, and the model of professional social work education imported from the United States came to be reconsidered and broadened the perspective of social welfare studies in Korea. The third period spans from the 1990s to the present, here it is called the years of \"Family‧Sociology‧Welfare\" majors/departments. The notion of social welfare came to be the pillars of national governance together with Democracy and Market Economy. And the surprisingly rapid ageing and changes in gender/family structure brought the explosion of demands for the social welfare, particularly social welfare services. And the universalization of higher education is the fact of Korea today. Now is the time to reconsolidate the identity of social welfare education as well as the study of social welfare, with cooperation with other neighboring disciplines.