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."

A Lack of Statistical Data

Gittell, the director of the Howard Samuels Policy Center at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, completed a study several years ago of welfare mothers in six states. Her research showed that the women, if enrolled in special programs to aid them at the same time they attended college maintained similar grades as other students.