EDITORIAL : FROM WELFARE TO WORK NEW STUDY SUGGESTS THAT REFORMS ARE VIABLE.

AT first glance, it would appear from a new study of California's welfare population that welfare reform is a daunting undertaking.

The Public Policy Institute of California reported last week that about a third - approximately 4.3 million - of all the families in the state receive some sort of aid. A quarter of the families participate in a major welfare program.

But the situation really isn't as bleak as it might appear. The study found, contrary to popular stereotypes, that ``welfare is not a way of life for most welfare families. Counting all cash welfare and food stamps received over two years (1993-94), the median participant family received only 6 percent of annual family income from welfare.''

Those figures suggest to us that the new federal program to move people from welfare to work, and the plan by Gov. Pete Wilson to implement it on the state level, can work. That's because a lot of people receiving welfare have worked in the past and have the capacity to do so in the future.

The new federal law ended AFDC entitlements and replaced them with TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Unlike AFDC, TANF has a lifetime limit of 60 months. But states can grant hardship exemptions for up to 20 percent of their caseloads.

The law requires recipients (except for exemptions) to move from welfare to work within 60 months. But as the study points out, the typical welfare family receives only 6 percent of its income from government programs. That figure suggests that in most instances, welfare provides temporary assistance rather than permanent help, and the time limit shouldn't create intolerable hardships for most people in need.

Moreover, the annual incomes of 25 percent of the state's welfare families exceeded $41,429. (``These families may not have been on welfare every month of the period, and the income of some family members may not have been counted by welfare administrators working on a case basis,'' the researchers said.)

We think it's reasonable to assume that many of the working-age members of those upper-income welfare families can find work.

It's commonly believed that many families are on welfare because the parents (or single parent, as often is the case) lack high school diplomas and can't find work. But the study found that educational attainment alone ``is a poor predictor of high dependency . . . In fact, high school dropout members of the AFDC population were no more likely to be highly dependent than were better-educated AFDC families.''

The highly dependent segment of the welfare population - about 432,000 families - poses a real challenge. But the PPIC study suggests to us that the best thing that the state can do to assist the rest is to encourage economic growth and job creation, rather than embark of costly new social programs that turn potentially productive citizens into wards of the state.