Welfare Reform Expected to Restrict College Access
She’s had many labels to describe her since her parents kicked her
out of their comfortable middle-class home in southern California and
onto the streets at age thirteen. Over the next fifteen years, Sallie
Shows would come to be known as a street kid, a pregnant teenager, a
crack cocaine addict, an unfit parent, and a welfare mother-of-six.
Today, amazingly, she is called a success story. The
twenty-eight-year-old Mountain View, Calif., woman is a straight-A
student who enrolled in Santa Clara University last fall.
“I don’t believe in lifetime welfare — that
lay-on-the-couch-and-collect-the-money thing,” says Shows, who
graduated last year from Foothill College with honors and an
associate’s degree.
But Shows, who still receives public assistance, likely will pay a
heavy price for her efforts to pull herself out of poverty and become a
clinical psychologist. The new welfare reform law passed last year by
Congress limits access to college to one year while on welfare. At the
same time, it requires recipients to work twenty hours a week. Those
who don’t abide by the provisions would lose most or all of their
benefits. Most people on public assistance will have to settle for
training certificates rather than a degree.
While hesitant to criticize the general
get-off-welfare-and-get-a-job trend, some educators and social policy
experts say the law has serious flaws that ultimately may make the
reforms self-defeating by dooming many to dead-end jobs and more
poverty.
“College students all over the country on welfare will be thrown
out,” says Dr. Marilyn Gittell, a national expert on welfare and higher
education. “It’s an outrageous policy. President Clinton has said that
he wants everyone to get two years of college education. Yet these
people are going to be thrown out of college? It doesn’t make sense.”
