Research indicates an overall decline and significant polarization in job quality and employment arrangements in the United States. Aside from discussions at a general level, little is known about how these trends may be playing out within the human services field. My dissertation addresses this gap by analyzing four decades of data from the US Current Population Survey (CPS) to track changes in multiple dimensions of job quality in frontline human service jobs, including wages, benefits, and employment arrangements, while considering variation in job quality trends by gender, race, and education. To explain trends in job quality, I highlight two institutional shifts that have shaped the human services field over the past four decades – privatization of human services and the expansion of for-profit providers in the field (marketization). I investigate whether these institutional changes contribute to lower job quality in frontline human service jobs and whether they disproportionately influence job quality based on race, gender, and education. My analyses reveal a decline in multiple aspects of job quality in human service jobs and significant stratification in the trends. Particularly, disparities in job quality between Black and white human service workers have not only persisted, but in some dimensions, grown wider over the decades. State-level rates of privatization and marketization in human services are negatively associated with job quality, with Black human service workers experiencing larger declines in full-time employment and wages. Overall, the study findings advance our understanding of the current state of job quality in human service jobs, highlighting a trajectory of overall decline and insufficient progress in both quality and equity, rather than improvement. Racial disparities in the ramifications of privatization and marketization for human service job quality underscore the need for social work researchers to examine the racialized consequences of these broader trends in the field. Amid chronic shortages in the human service workforce, while recent policy efforts focus on addressing labor supply barriers, my study emphasizes the importance of intervening on the demand side as well, with state and local governments taking proactive steps to promote human service provider practices that enhance quality and equity in frontline human service jobs.