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CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In the 1996 commencement address he delivered at Princeton University, President Bill Clinton declared, “It is clear that America has the best higher education system in the world and that it is the key to a successful future in the twenty-first century. It is also clear that because of costs and other factors not all Americans have access to higher education. I want to say today that I believe the clear facts of this time make it imperative that our goal must be nothing less than to make the thirteenth and fourteenth years of education as universal to all of Americans as the first twelve are today.”1 He then proceeded to describe his “college opportunity strategy,” which included the biggest expansion of college aid since the GI Bill, which funded college attendance for thousands of veterans after World War II. Later that same year, Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (otherwise known as welfare reform), which was designed to “end welfare as we know it.” He declared, “This bill will help people to go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck.” There was no mention of college, nor even education, in his speech. That is because, as he put it, “We are saying with this bill that we expect work.”2 The difference in President Clinton’s rhetoric in those two speeches demonstrates a new attitude toward poor Americans that became a widely accepted tenet of popular discourse by the mid-1990s: an idea that is often referred to as the “work-first” approach to social welfare policy. The title of his campaign book labeled Clinton the Putting People First president. But work-first does not put people first, and it differs significantly from the “college for all” ethic Clinton talked about at Princeton; in fact, it stands in stark contrast to it. According to the work-first perspective, college is for some, not for all. For those at the bottom of the income distribution who have turned to the government for support, work—and work only—is deemed most appropriate. “Work-first” is a simple idea. In fact, its strength lies in its simplicity: poverty can be alleviated by moving the poor off welfare and into work as quickly as possible. This notion powerfully capitalizes on the American ideals of individualism and hard work, focusing squarely and exclusively on employment as the route out of dependency. This shifting emphasis decouples education and work, despite increasing evidence that they must be linked. In so doing, it effectively ignores the critical role that high-quality education and training play in achieving self-sufficiency, especially for the most vulnerable populations. Consequently, work-first policies and practices have further weakened this country’s already-fraying social safety net, effectively ensuring that the poor will remain in poverty or be sorted into low-paying jobs with little chance for advancement. This book examines the ascendance of the work-first idea—its emergence at the federal level, its dominance in policy and practice at the state level, its impact on access to education and training generally and, more specifically, on the institutions that serve as the entryway to postsecondary education for the disadvantaged—community colleges. We focus on exploring work-first as it is embodied in two policies: welfare reform and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). By tracing the emergence and the implementation of work-first from the broadest federal level to the most localized communities and educational institutions, we demonstrate how it has usurped human-capital ideals, which link the economic well-being of the poor with education and training. We also show the very real impact this shift has had on the institutions and individuals most directly affected by it. Our argument about the far-reaching effects of the work-first idea is threepronged , and is based on an extensive array of both quantitative and qualitative data collected over the course of four years (2001 to 2005) and across six states (Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island ). First, we argue that the ascendance of the work-first ideology challenges a human-capital approach that links economic self-sufficiency with access to high-quality postsecondary education. Contemporary policy harbors a contradictory set of notions that discredit education as a viable route out of poverty for the poor, even as it promotes education for the non-poor. Second, as embodied in welfare...