Welfare Reform and Enrollment in Postsecondary Schools Among Single Mothers

Background and Purpose: Education is an important source of human capital development that leads to employment and economic security. The recent American Recovery Act made it clear that access to education even for nontraditional students is key to workforce development for a 21st century economy. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, because of its work-first strategy, has been criticized to have reduced access to education, especially postsecondary education, among low-income single mothers. The purpose of this research was to examine if and how much the welfare reform of 1996 affected school enrollment, particularly full-time enrollment in postsecondary schools, among the target population.

Methods: Fifteen years of cross-sectional data from October Current Population Survey (CPS) of 1994 through 2008 were pulled together for this study. CPS is a nationally representative survey of 57,000 households, conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and has data on family relationships, and school attendance, and other demographic information. The sample was females without college degrees between age 21 and 49. In order to answer the research question, difference-in-difference (DD) and difference-in-difference-in-difference (DDD) methods were used to estimate the probabilities of school enrollment (secondary and postsecondary) while controlling for race, age, disability status, employment status, and state unemployment rates. For DD method, single mothers and single childless females were chosen for the target group and the comparison group, respectively. In the DDD method, the difference in the probability of school enrollment found from DD method was further controlled by including married mothers in the logistic regressions analyses.

Findings: The descriptive analyses found that single mothers' school enrollment rates continuously fell from around 15 percent in 1994 to 11.5 percent in 2000 and fluctuated since then until 2008. The results of DD analyses revealed that the welfare reform of 1996 significantly reduced college enrollment among single mothers in 1997, 1999, and 2000, approximately 15 percent to 20 percent lower than the 1994 pre-welfare rate. However, the reform reduced full-time college enrollment even more significantly, that is, up to 37 percent in 2000. The DD result indicated that enrollment in secondary schools was not reduced by welfare reform. Interestingly, when the DDD was used to control for other unobservable policy changes that might have been associated with school enrollment, the results showed that the reform did not significantly reduce school enrollment, even full-time college enrollment, among single mothers.

Implications: The findings indicated that we have to make a cautious conclusion about the effect of the welfare reform of 1996 on school enrollment among low-income single mothers: it does not seem that the reform significantly reduced school enrollment. The results were more sensitive to the methods or the level of statistical controls used to answer the research question. More research and policy implications are discussed.