Last in and first out: poor students in academe in times of fiscal crisis.

The disparity between the experiences of allegedly "deserving and normative" middle class and wealthy students and those of low-income students in higher education is clear when we consider practices that at best discourage and at worst prohibit the poorest of the poor--welfare and former welfare recipient parents--from earning educational degrees. Despite numerous studies confirming the relationship between higher education and increased earnings (Adair and Dahlberg 2002; Greenberg, Strawn, and Plimpton 1999; IWRP 1998; Strawn 1998; Wolfe and Gittell 1997; Thompson 1993), in 1996 Congress enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) as a part of welfare reform. Composed of a broad tangle of legislation, this act "devolved" the responsibility of assistance to the poor from the federal to the state level and, through a range of block grants, sanctions, and rewards, encouraged states to reduce their welfare rolls by developing work requirements, imposing strict time limits, discouraging "illegitimacy," and reducing the numbers of applicants eligible for services. The act also allowed for the development of programs and requirements that had the effect of discouraging welfare recipients from enrolling in higher education programs, mandating rather that they engage in "work first."

Specifically, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirements, part of the 1996 PRWORA, drastically limited poor women's opportunities to participate in post-secondary education programs while receiving state support. Unlike previous provisions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and JOBS education training programs in existence when I first went to college as a single mother welfare recipient student in 1987, TANF restrictions from 1996 did not allow higher education to be counted as "work" and required a larger proportion of welfare recipients to engage in full-time recognized work activities. This work-first philosophy emphasized rapid entry into the labor force and penalized states for allowing long-term access to either education or training.

As a result of the dramatic overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, recipient students left college for low-wage jobs in record numbers. Even as we as a nation embraced the belief that access to education is the pathway to social and economic mobility, poor women were denied access to higher education that could have positively altered the course of their lives and those of their children. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in the first year of welfare reform, tens of thousands of poor women were forced to drop out of school; across the nation, the decrease in enrollments among welfare recipients ranged from 29 percent to 82 percent (Bazie and Kayatin 1998; Greenberg et al. 1999; Pastore 1999; Strawn 1998).

In 1998, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) conducted a preliminary survey of key policy advocates in the fifty states and Washington, D.C., regarding welfare recipients' abilities to enter into and complete educational degrees. The study found that welfare recipients are "generally unable to count post-secondary education as a work activity" (Strawn 1998, 28). The CLASP study reported that, as a result, the number of families reported as participating in activities that would lead to a post-secondary degree was cut in half by 1998. In 1995, almost 649,000 students across the nation were receiving AFDC benefits while enrolled in full-time educational programs; by the 1998-1999 school year, that figure had dropped by 47.6 percent, to fewer than 340,000 students. Today the number is estimated to have been reduced again by over 93%, with a national enrollment of fewer than 35,000 students.

The prospects for students shut out are dismal. A twenty-five-year old former computer science major with a ten-year-old son now works earning $7.90 per hour (2004). In response to my query concerning changes in her family's quality of life as a result of the 1996 reform, she wrote:

   I call it welfare deform. Things are
   so much harder now. We can barely
   pay our rent. My son is alone all
   the time when I work. I just don't
   see a future anymore. With school
   there was hope. I was on my way
   to making a decent living for us.
   Now it is just impossible to survive
   day to day. Usually I can't pay my
   rent. They are hounding me to
   repay school loans and I don't have
   enough for food. Did you know
   that you can't even bankrupt student
   loans? I don't have a cent
   saved for emergencies. I don't
   know what I'm [going to] do.
   (Adair 1998)

Another gifted and dedicated education major returned to welfare after being forced to leave the university and then losing several minimum-wage jobs because she could not afford reliable child care and was denied childcare assistance from the state for failing to name her child's abusive father. She described the nightmare of losing job after minimum-wage job in order to care for her child, emphasizing that this was a "choice no mother should be forced to make." She added:

   It came down to, if I want to keep
   this job at [largest retailer in the
   U.S.] I have to leave my three-year-old
   daughter alone or maybe
   with a senile neighbor. And I
   couldn't even really afford that! Or
   we could go back to her dad who
   is a drunk. If I don't do that we
   could both end up hungry or
   homeless. The choice they are
   making me make is to either abandon
   or hurt my daughter, and for
   what? (Adair 1999)

Similarly, Tonya Mitchell, the single mother of twins and a very successful pre-nursing major committed to providing health care for low-income and minority populations, was forced to drop out of a nursing program and assigned a "work first position" in a nursing home. She reminds us, "all I wanted was to be a nurse and help care for people. I had a very high grade point average and was on my way to a nursing degree with jobs that pay over $25 an hour in addition to benefits." Today, after over six years as an aid, Mitchell makes $8.75 per hour. She adds:

   I still need help from the state with
   childcare and food stamps and life
   is so much harder for us now than
   it was before. Clearly welfare
   reform and the Personal
   Responsibility Act changed our
   lives. I do not have the money I
   need to pay my rent and bills, my
   twins are in an awful daycare for
   about ten hours a day while I work
   in a job I hate, and we have little
   hope. If we survive it will be
   despite welfare reform! (Mitchell
   2002, 163)

The experiences of students who had worked diligently to become responsible workers, taxpayers and parents capable of providing their families with some degree of financial security, and who were forced to drop out of school to live in perpetual poverty, illustrate one startling failure of 1996 "welfare reform."

In 1997 policy analysts Leslie Wolfe and Marilyn Gittell warned that "the work requirement of the new federal welfare law is causing thousands of low-income women to drop out of college to take dead end jobs with low pay and no future. This exodus of welfare recipients from the classroom must stop" (1999, 1). The hope among committed educators and social activists was that this failure would be remedied in 2002 when the PRWORA came up for reauthorization. A record number of educators, educational administrators, students, and citizen activists lobbied for reauthorization that would include post-secondary education as an option for welfare recipients. Despite these efforts, reauthorization of welfare reform's key legislation has proven to be even more punitive for low-income women attempting to earn educational degrees in the U.S.

The House of Representatives' welfare reauthorization bill, passed on May 16, 2003, put greater limitations on recipients by allowing a maximum of three months of vocational training during a two-year period and counting only "job readiness education," and not education and training that would lead to career development and sustainable wages, as work activity. The bill (HR 4092) also increased TANF participation rates that all states are required to meet and increased the required hours each TANF recipient must work. House Bill 4092 set unrealistic work requirements for many families without necessary support set vices. The new TANF work goals required almost all parent recipients to work, and increased their work from 30 to 40 hours a week regardless of the ages of the children in the household. At the same time the bill provided only a fraction of needed childcare dollars, prohibited childcare assistance for non-work-related activities (such as school), sanctioned entire families (including children) if parents failed to meet work participation requirements, and gave states the right to override protections for families under federal law with a "super-waiver" provision.

Four months after passage of HR 4092, the Senate Finance Committee approved a reauthorization bill, dubbed the PRIDE bill (Personal Responsibility and Individual Development for Everyone). The Senate's PRIDE bill also increased both work hours for individual recipients and states' participation requirements, but failed to allocate sufficient childcare funds, and allowed state superwaivers to take precedence over federal protections. For many, the most egregious component of both the House and the Senate reauthorization bills was a reduction in allowances for recipients to enter into education programs and in childcare funding coupled with the ground-breaking earmarking of $1.5-$2 billion dollars in federal TANF funds over the next five years for a narrow set of rigidly defined "marriage promotion" activities.

As many welfare analysts and recipients argue, welfare reform in 1996 and the reform reauthorization in 2003 were designed to control, regulate, and somehow "neutralize" poor women's "illegal and unruly" bodies through the institutions of marriage and work. Indeed, the first sentence in welfare reforms key legislation proclaims that "marriage and work are the foundations of a civilized nation." From the perspective of welfare students, this prohibition against both personal fulfillment and independence through education and single motherhood has dangerous implications.

While being denied support with which to feed and care for their children and prohibited from entering into educational programs, welfare recipient parents are encouraged and rewarded for attending marriage formation clinics and workshops (for which childcare and lunch are provided). During the last family formation seminar that I attended with student recipients in the basement of a church in Utica, New York, we were treated to a complimentary set of artificial fingernails, as we were reminded by a very enthusiastic pastor that a good wife yields to both God and her husband, sometimes even against the perceived needs of her own children. When a student participant from our group asked the Department of Health and Human Services Director, who was observing our seminar, his thoughts about higher education for the poor, he replied, without irony: "Education is necessary in order to support and nurture your families. I strongly encourage you to support your husbands in going to college and doing whatever they can to make you and your children healthy and happy. Millions of wives--even my own mother--helped put their husbands through school on the GI bill, and they wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for that sacrifice."

Obvious questions arise from these mandates: Who are poor women going to marry? Why would poor women want to marry? How does marrying a poor spouse and risking more children lift anyone out of poverty? More fundamentally, legislation that denies poor women the opportunity to earn educational credentials, to be fulfilled as individuals, to be able to stand on their own two feet and care for their own children, coupled with rhetoric that says that all single mothers are bad mothers and that as a nation we can only value "legitimate" married mothers and their children, is, or should be, a problem for all.

These punitive and damaging welfare restrictions are exacerbated by educational policy that dissuades low-income, single mothers from entering into college programs and completing degrees. My colleague Sandra Dahlberg has documented financial aid practices that further disadvantage already economically disadvantaged students. In "Families First: But Not in Higher Education," she reminds us that financial aid offers that count child and welfare income as resources but fail to offset them with child-related costs of living, grant and aid offers that result in a zero sum gain for low-income students, and minimum wage work-study programs that subsidize the profitability of U.S. colleges and universities while penalizing low-income students, all create institutions that increasingly "penalize and facilitate the failure of low-income aid recipients" (Adair and Dahlberg, 2002). The combination of lack of access to higher education, stringent work and parenting requirements, financial penalty for poor students, and lack of support for low-income student parents results in devastating drops in enrollment and college completion that are then used to justify further cuts in support and access.

PRWORA welfare reform policy has also dramatically impacted educational policy in state equal opportunity programs around the nation. Higher Education Opportunity Programs (HEOP) and Equal Opportunity Programs (EOP) are charged with recruiting and supporting underrepresented students of color and economically disadvantaged students. In the United States today, the vast majority of those living below the poverty line live in single mother headed households, with mothers who themselves have little or no experience with higher education. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the EOP programs served about 58 percent students of color; the majority (over 90 percent) of those students were traditional age, dependent, childless students, and about 70 percent of those students were from low-income families. Thirty-three percent of the students served in that same period were white, but economically disadvantaged students. In total, EOP and HEOP programs supported welfare student populations that made up about 12 to 15 percent of their total student population. EOP programs that supported these non-traditional, low-income student parents offered limited support to their students, but were able to calculate some non-traditional needs--such as childcare and the cost of raising children--into their students' need equations.

In the post welfare reform and reauthorization era, these figures are dramatically altered. Today, less than 0.5 percent of EOP and HEOP populations around the nation are low-income, single parents, and thus nontraditional students of any race. That 0.5 percent of students are no longer entitled to have family need calculated into their support packages and must fulfill all state and county work and reporting requirements, even if enrolled as full-time students, and of course as full-time parents.

All of these damaging material practices are exacerbated by pedagogical strategies that hurt poor students. An absence of comprehensive social, academic, personal, family and career services in the academy means that poor single mothers often face insurmountable barriers to their education. A study my colleagues and I conducted in 1999 and 2000, at Hamilton College, provides additional analysis regarding some of these obstacles. Analyzing survey responses from over 85 former welfare recipient, post-secondary students in the Central New York area, we found that poor single mothers had indeed often left school even when they had been successful with their studies, because they could not manage child-care, transportation, and work responsibilities. Respondents to our survey--who had attended a range of public community colleges, and public and private colleges and universities--made it clear that they also often ended their studies became they felt demoralized, misunderstood, and misrepresented in the classroom. When asked to cite the primary reasons that these students left school, only 20 percent noted that they had ever received a failing grade. A far greater number reported that they left school due to lack of sufficient social services, financial aid, and family support. And a startling number--almost 60 percent--also indicated that they left school because they had been made to feel "shamed," "worthless," and "invisible" in their classrooms and throughout their educational experiences.

One student said that the most important lesson she learned in a class on the sociology of poverty was that "my people, my family and I, and our culture are problems" and that "poor people in general, but welfare recipients specifically are stupid and immoral drains on the country." Another student in our interviews spoke of attending a class on American literature with a professor who failed to interrogate pat, stereotypical depictions of poor women in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, or John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle. She claimed: "I was so humiliated by what the professor found charming and amusing, that I left the class never to return to school."

In "Not by Myself Alone: Upward Bound with Family and Friends," Deborah Megivern similarly reflects on her experience in a political science class where "students expressed extremely negative and stereotypical views of poor people, and I was too afraid to challenge their thinking," and where her "shame and vulnerability about [her] background prevented [Megivern] from discussing [her] history or even sharing [her] perspective." For Megivern, classes focusing on poverty were especially challenging. As she recalls: "It felt as though people who had never gone hungry were essentially discussing my family, my friends, even me, as though we were all objects. When I attempted to share my first hand knowledge of poverty, I did not have the credibility to be heard in class. At any rate, personal experience often is not a legitimate basis for disagreement in school, whereas it is a form of truth for poor people" (2002, 125).

My own experiences as a welfare recipient student certainly support these perspectives. My sense of dislocation and fragmentation was particularly acute in classes where I often became both the subject and the object of investigation. Experiencing an overwhelming sense of liminality, I recall one particularly painful experience in a graduate English classroom, in which student and teacher alike were lamenting and laughing at the inability of the poor to come to "political consciousness." One student--the daughter of a doctor and a lawyer as I recall--joked that welfare women were "too busy bowling and breeding, too busy eating Cheetoes, and too numb with complacency" to fight for political equity. As the class chuckled in amused agreement, I felt ripped in two. I was laughing with those I hoped would be my new colleagues, about my own existence, my own people, and those I loved and valued. In the bitterness of that moment I knew that I was homeless. It took more courage for me to return to that class the following week than I have ever had to muster in my life.

For many poor single mothers, the academy becomes a place of fear and diminished value rather than a site of empowerment. For it is here that a culture that often "others" poor single mothers is represented and legitimized by those who profess authority over our lives. Low-income single mother students often experience profound and debilitating terror, shame, humiliation, and objectification, even in classrooms meant to foster independent scholarship and critical thinking. Students feel alienated and inferior because of their poverty and social class, in ways that reflect the language and sentiments found in the PRWORA and in pejorative educational policy. As one former welfare recipient, honor student astutely reflected:

   With the passage of welfare reform,
   and the belief in the academy that
   poor women are stupid and undeserving,
   layers of citizens from welfare
   officials to teachers and students
   question why we are in
   school. Through their actions and
   in class they represent us as unworthy
   and imply that by attending
   college we are somehow wasting
   our and their time and money.
   One professor told me exactly what
   I had just heard the day before
   from my caseworker when he said
   "Why don't you get off your
   [behind] and quit playing here.
   Get a job or get married so
   you can take care of your
   kids. No one will allow
   you to waste your time in
   school." (Adair 2000)

And this is where it all comes together. Welfare reform, supported by voters, posits that poor women should either work or marry and that they are neither able nor entitled to go to school. Educational policy reifies this belief by financially punishing and failing to support this increasingly underrepresented population; and classroom pedagogy is the final nail in the casket, driving poor student parents away from the educations they so desperately need and want.

A small but growing number of colleges and universities have responded to the needs of this struggling population by implementing mechanisms designed to assist--rather than to thwart--poor single-mother students in their efforts to negotiate punitive TANF restrictions and gain access to higher education. In addition to designing, implementing, and advocating for programs and pedagogies that support these students, educators can have a significant impact on the lives of poor single mothers by working with state legislators and local welfare offices to create policies that support and enable low-income student parents to earn educational degrees; by lobbying to extend the amount of time recipients can receive educational training beyond states' enrollment limits; by encouraging colleges to work with state and local officials to provide employment opportunities that are aligned with academic and family schedules; and by working for economic parity by attempting to amend PROWRA reauthorizations. Educators can also be a force in reshaping the Higher Education Act, so that poor women can go to college, so that financial aid offices can count the costs associated with dependent children in the needs analysis for federal student aid, so that student financial aid can be exempted as income when calculating welfare eligibility, and so that increased Pell Grants will cover dependent care allowances.

There is much work to be done. As educators we stand at a critical junction. If we challenge ourselves to champion and support this vulnerable population in their attempts to negotiate punitive contemporary welfare and college restrictions and prohibitions against earning college degrees, rather than participating in their disenfranchisement and removal from the academy, we will take a step toward positioning education as a truly democratic project with the potential to enact social change and foster economic opportunity. As an educator who believes in and works to enact the radical potential of higher education, and as a generationally poor woman whose life was transformed through education, I not only accept but embrace this challenge.

WORKS CITED

Adair, Vivyan. 2001. "Poverty. and the (Broken) Promise of Higher Education." Harvard Educational Review. Summer, Volume 71; No 2: 217-239.

Adair, Vivyan and Sandra Dahlberg. 2003. Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Adair, Vivyan, Erol Balkan, and Sharon Gormley. 1999-2000. Clinton, New York: Hamilton College. Unpublished survey.

Bazie, Michelle and Toni Kayatin. 1998. Average Incomes of Very Poor Families Fell during Early Years of Welfare Reform. Washington, D.C.: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Dahlberg, Sandra. 2003. "Families First, But Not in Higher Education." In Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Ed. Adair and Dahlberg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 169-195.

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Mcgivern, Deborah. 2003. "Not By Myself Alone: Upward Bound with Family and Friends. In Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Ed. Adair and Dahlberg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 119-130.

Mitchell, Tonya. 2003. "If I Survive, It Will Be Despite Welfare Reform: Reflections of a Former Welfare Student." In Reclaiming Class." Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Ed. Adair and Dahlberg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 113-118.

Pastore, Claire. "Threatened with Lawsuit, State Overhauls Policies for Student Welfare Recipients." Equal Rights Advocates, 11 August, 1999. Online at http://www.equalrights.org.

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Wolfe, Leslie and Marilyn Gittell. 1997. College Education Is A Route out of Poverty for Women on Welfare. Washington, DC: Center for Women's Policy Studies.