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The ACCESS Project
Exhibit and Invited Lectures
Contact Information
Vivyan Adair
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Poverty and the Promise of Higher EducationPost-secondary education can break the cycle of poverty for low-income parents and their children. Through the process of successfully completing a liberal arts college degree and engaging in relevant, pre-career internships and work-study positions, low income parents develop crucial critical thinking, creative, analytical, and communicative skills, master a broad range of important subject knowledge, and gain experience and credentials that enable them to become full and productive citizens, scholars, workers, and parents. Yet low-income single parents are often not able to enter into and receive degree program credentials because of increasingly restrictive Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) work requirements and lack of family, financial, and academic supports in place at most colleges and universities. There is an overwhelming need to support low-income parents in their efforts to enter into and complete college programs that will lead to financially secure and fulfilling career employment. Since the implementation of welfare reform in 1996, politicians, policy analysts, and political pundits have unabashedly celebrated a reduction in the "welfare rolls" as evidence that America is renewing its democratic principles and foundational work ethic. Yet, as many recent studies indicate, moving people off of welfare is not tantamount to moving them out of poverty. Indeed, as a result of welfare reform, the poor in our country have become poorer. Bazie and Kayatin, in a study for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that "the average income for the most destitute single mother households fell from $8,624 in 1995 to $8,047 in 1997, largely because of the 1996 welfare reform law designed to get people off of the public dole" (1998, 3). Race, class, and gender work with marital and maternal status to determine an individual's chance of being and staying poor in the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998, 1999). Three years after the devolution of welfare, those who have made the transition from welfare to work still remain on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. For example, the Urban Institute found that the most employable of the welfare recipients who initially left the welfare rolls did so for jobs that paid an average of $6.60 per hour, a wage that simply cannot support a family (Nightengale, Trutko and Barnow, 1999). Pamela Loprest finds that "hourly wages, monthly earnings, and job characteristics all indicate that [welfare] leavers are entering the low end of the labor market where they are working in much the same circumstances as near-poor and low-income mothers" (1999, 1). Loprest also notes that "nearly one third of those who left welfare [for work] returned to welfare within one year" (1999, 2). Research from the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) supports these findings and disabuses us of the notion that job-training programs make a long-term difference in lifting poor women out of poverty. After considering the impact of welfare-to-work job-training programs across the nation, the institute found that: Although job training increased the likelihood of working by nearly 28%, those with job training earned only three cents per hour more than those without job training. Both groups earned hourly wages that, even if earned full-time, year round, would not lift a family out of poverty. (1998, 20) The widening chasm between the economically stable and the poor is a gap most often predicated on the distinction between those who have an education As they embrace the challenge of becoming educated citizens moving toward career positions ACCESS Students demonstrate that with hard work and adequate support, low-income parents--often with no history of educational and/or career achievement--can become increasingly Only training, support and education will provide the poor with access to jobs that will enable them to support their families. (Carnevale 1999) those who do not. Anthony Carnevale, an economist with the Educational Testing Service, posits that since the 1980’s access to college has determined on which side of the gulf a person will land. On one side of that gap heads of households who must somehow survive and support their families in dead-end jobs with few benefits and little hope of advancement. In a recent report delivered at the National Conference on Welfare Reform and the College Option, Carnevale reminded attendees that the most undereducated positioned to engage in work with no career ladders, no training, and often no way out. In a telling calculation, Carnevale emphasized that the sentiment any job is a good job," which underwrites much contemporary welfare reform policy, is based on fallacious logic. This rhetoric rests on the notion that starting at entry-level positions will eventually lead to sustainable employment. Carnevale countered this logic by illustrating that a single mother with two young children, who begins a job that pays $13,000 per year today (which is much higher than the average reported by the Center for Urban Studies) and who is able (against all odds) to actually keep that job, will earn only $17,000 after ten years of steady cost-of-living adjustments. At $17,000, the income of her family of three will still fall well below the poverty threshold. The theory that she will "rise above" this position is unfounded unless she has access to training and education. Carnevale further argued that the same single mother could earn $28,000 to $32,000 a year after only two years in a post-secondary educational program. Carnevale's research results are clear and convincing: only training, support, and education will provide the poor with access to jobs that will enable them to support their families. (Carnevale 1999). |
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