NEA: Higher Education Advocate OnLine

Activists: 'Reform Welfare Reform'

Current Plan Threatens Community College Students

NEA higher education members in California and Massachusetts are organizing to offset what they call the Draconian effects of new state welfare requirements.

Members and activists, including Susan Jhirad of Massachusetts and Cathy Sproles of California, want to ensure that their states' work requirements for welfare recipients, following the federal welfare reform legislation enacted last fall, don't force their students to drop out.

The federal law leaves unclear whether community college courses can count toward the work requirement. If community college study isn't viewed as vocational training in negotiations now taking place in Congress--and does not fulfill the work requirement--many of the nation's 700,000 college students now on welfare might have to quit.

"Welfare reform threatens the role of community colleges in helping recipients attain access to a decent-paying job," says former California Community College Association President Cathy Sproles.

NEA's California community college affiliate is challenging a number of legislative attempts to limit welfare recipients access to the community colleges.

"Community colleges are the best provider of vocational and technical education," Sproles says, calling the community college a stepping-stone to self-sufficiency. "We are the most affordable educational system in the world."

Approximately 10 percent of the students at California's 106 community college campuses receive welfare, while 18 percent of California's welfare recipients are community college students. Sproles says enrollments will decline significantly if students are forced into low-paying jobs.

Reforms have already taken a toll in Massachusetts. Since the onset of welfare reform began, community college enrollment for mothers on welfare has dropped 40 percent--and is "getting worse all the time," notes Susan Jhirad.

Jhirad, an English professor at North Shore Community College, is co-founder of the Welfare Education Training Access Coalition (WETAC) in Massachusetts. The group, which includes the Massachusetts Community College Council, conducts research, lobbies to change state welfare legislation, and works at the grassroots level to tell welfare recipients of their rights.

"It's practically impossible for single parents to go to college, work 20 hours during the week, and be parents to their kids," Jhirad says. "This is what makes women stay in poverty."

In both states, activists are making the argument that welfare students greatly add to their earning potential and the likelihood that they will get off and stay off welfare by completing their education.

"These are students who are trying to create a better life for their children," notes Sproles.

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