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CHAPTER SEVEN. THE POWER OF WORK-FIRST: IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE TRENDS
- Russell Sage Foundation
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CHAPTER SEVEN THE POWER OF WORK-FIRST: IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE TRENDS Julie is a twenty-year-old single white mother—demographically speaking, a typical welfare recipient.1 She has a daughter just under two years old. In addition to working fifteen hours a week, she is enrolled in the local community college where she is pursuing an associate’s degree in education. Julie is able to do this because she lives in Illinois, a state with relatively liberal welfare policies that allows welfare recipients to pursue a limited amount of postsecondary education while receiving welfare benefits. As she talks, it becomes clear that Julie has little doubt that college is her route out of poverty. Although she has worked since she was sixteen, she’s never held a job that paid more than the minimum wage. Having dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, she knows that her prospects of obtaining living-wage employment without further education are slim. Asked why she is enrolled in college , Julie said, “In order to give [my daughter] the best possible life. I’m not going to just fall into a job that pays twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year if I’m uneducated.” She perceives that the current welfare system is making it very difficult for her to achieve her goal of becoming financially independent. Despite the fact that she lives in Illinois, a state where formal welfare policy allows relatively generous access to education and training, her experience in the welfare system tells her that it is hostile to the pursuit of postsecondary education. She reports seeing a sign in one welfare office that proudly advertised a drastic drop in the welfare rolls. “They are eager to push the people on welfare to get them a job, maybe at Burger King, making minimum wage or maybe a little above that, with no benefits.” She goes on to critique the system, asking, “Is there an incentive program for [caseworkers] to get people off of welfare? Do they get cash benefits for throwing these people off of it because it’s kind of their goal?” Denying access to college is, in her opinion, “irresponsible, and it’s pushing the problem off to something that’s going to grow even larger later.” If parents don’t have an education, “it’s the kids that end up suffering. It’s the kids who end up living in poverty and it’s the kids who don’t have good health coverage.” Without a doubt, Julie has a clear understanding of the benefits of education that accrue at many levels.2 So, too, does the American public. There is broad agreement and strong evidence to support the contention that education is the surest and most consistent route to self-sufficiency that exists in American society today. Unemployment rates decrease, and median annual earnings increase, as a function of educational attainment; and welfare recipients in particular experience significant gains in income and employment when they receive quality education combined with job training (National Center for Education Statistics 2002). In fact, the education system in the United States has expanded at all levels for much of the last century, as the working class has steadily increased its average level of education from completion of grammar school at the beginning of the century to the completion of high school by mid-century and, in the postwar period, to a substantial increase in the percentages of high school graduates attending and completing college. Factors promoting access such as Pell grants, open admissions, and indeed the expansion of the community college system itself—all point to and reinforce one central tenet of American ideology: education is the best and surest way to climb up the social ladder and achieve some semblance of the American Dream. What the sociologist Randall Collins asserted in 1979 is still true today: “Education is the most important determinant yet discovered of how far one will go in today’s world” (Collins 1979, 3). But Julie’s experience also illustrates a curious and disturbing paradox that has emerged in American thinking about the value of education. Despite the indisputable benefits of investing in human capital through education, somehow the American public has accepted the notion that the poorest amongst us do not deserve the same access to college as other Americans. Instead, the work-first idea has come to dominate recent federal policy regarding college access for...