Students' Perspectives on Juggling Work, Family, and College - Information gathered on low-wage workers in the Opening Doors focus groups at six community colleges has important implications for colleges, employers, and policymakers. Read about them in the December Leadership Abstracts.
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Students' Perspectives on Juggling Work, Family, and College
Lisa Matus-Grossman <mailto:lgrossman@nga.org> and Susan Gooden
<mailto:susan.gooden@vt.edu>
An important public policy challenge of the 21st century is how to increase opportunities for career mobility and wage progression among low-wage workers. Community colleges have the potential to play an important role in addressing this challenge, since receiving an associate's degree or vocational certificate is related to higher earnings.
All levels of government are grappling with how to provide low-wage workers, or the working poor, with opportunities for career advancement and wage progression. Since the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996, increasing numbers of current and former welfare recipients have been joining the low-wage workforce, so that career mobility is an important concern for welfare-to-work efforts as well. There is a strong correlation between college credentials and higher earnings, and community colleges that offer low-wage workers opportunities to increase their earnings and improve their families' overall economic well-being by enhancing their marketable job skills with advanced education and training. Yet many low-wage workers do not capitalize on the opportunities offered by community colleges. Either they do not apply, or a high proportion of those who do apply and enroll drop out.
Through the Opening Doors to Earning Credentials initiative, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) is exploring ways to increase community college access and retention for nontraditional students, including low-wage workers. The first publication from the project, co-published with the National Governors Association, is titled Opening Doors: Expanding Educational Opportunities for Low-Income Workers. It presented promising state and local practices and policy changes that might improve postsecondary enrollments and completion rates. The new report builds on this earlier work by sharing the educational and life experiences of current, former, and potential low-wage working students as they themselves described in focus groups.
The Opening Doors study uses information gathered in focus groups at six community colleges from current, former, and potential students--most of them single parents--to explore institutional and personal access and retention issues they face as they seek a workable balance of college, work, and family responsibilities. The focus group findings have important implications for the community colleges, employers, and policymakers who work with these nontraditional students.
Based on their demonstrated commitment and capacity to make college offerings more accessible to nontraditional students, including low-wage workers, the six community colleges across the nation selected for the Opening Doors study were LaGuardia Community College (NY) Cabrillo College (CA), Macomb Community College (MI), Portland Community College (OR), Sinclair Community College (OH), and Valencia Community College (FL), and their partners. Across these six colleges, 18 focus groups were conducted involving three groups of low-wage workers: (1) current students enrolled in community college credit-granting programs, (2) former students previously enrolled in community college who left and have not since earned a credential, and (3) potential students who have never attended a credit-granting program at a community college. A total of 131 individuals participated in the focus groups, which consisted mostly of women between ages 21 and 40 who are parents.
The study provides insights about low-wage workers' knowledge about and experiences with community college programs and services. The findings from the report have implications for the upcoming national debates over reauthorization of legislation affecting welfare and higher education. There will certainly be dialogue about whether or not to expand the current postsecondary education and training options under the federal welfare legislation. As the Opening Doors study indicates, these debates should also explore the barriers that welfare recipients and other low-wage workers face in accessing and completing college programs.
Principal Findings
Focus group participants identified stable child care; personal support from family members, peers, and college faculty and staff; and accommodating employers as leading factors influencing their ability to stay in college, complete their programs of study within expected time frames, or enroll in the first place. Expanding on-campus support services and introducing new course formats that offer modularized or short-term training options with more flexible schedules may lower these barriers and enable students to complete courses more quickly.
Although the direct costs of tuition and books are significant factors in the ability of low-wage students to attend community colleges, focus group participants emphasized that lost wages from having to reduce work hours strongly influenced their ability to afford college. College administrators and policymakers may want to consider offering new forms of financial aid that help low-wage working students meet direct education-related costs as well as replace lost income.
With regard to community college institutional supports, focus group participants who were able to take advantage of academic and personal counseling and flexible on-campus child care (that offered extended hours of coverage and could accommodate both infants and older children) described these services as enormously valuable. Other students, however, either were not able to avail themselves of these services, were unaware that the services existed, or were unsure whether they would be eligible for them. In addition to expanding the availability of these supports, colleges may want to increase their outreach and marketing efforts. Students participating in the focus groups reported that they had difficulty accessing work-based safety-net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, earned income credits, Section 8 housing vouchers, and child-care subsidies. Because these programs can provide fundamental supports for work and education, colleges could improve students' access to them by developing partnerships with public agencies and community-based organizations.
Although community colleges do offer a range of financial, academic, and personal support services, the Opening Doors findings suggest that some of the issues raised by low-wage working students could be addressed by marketing existing services better and offering supplemental services by partnering with other public and private service providers. There are several options that college administrators and policymakers might consider:
*Making new or expanded forms of existing financial aid more accessible to
working students
*Adopting more flexible and faster course delivery formats
* Expanding campus-based college and community support services and benefits (including child care)
* Creating bridges between non-credit and credit programs
* Designing lifelong learning opportunities and career pathways
While many low-wage working students are already succeeding in postsecondary education, thanks to the efforts of community colleges like those in the Opening Doors study, other current and former students in the study described barriers to completing their programs that colleges and public or private partners could address. Likewise, some potential students among the low-wage labor force are interested in attending college but lack the basic information and financial resources to make that possible.
Although no single overriding barrier prevents low-wage workers from accessing and completing community college, the strategies to address multiple barriers based on educational, financial-aid, partnership, and student-support-service approaches may hold great promise for enrolling and graduating larger numbers of low-wage working parents.
Lisa Matus-Grossman <mailto:lgrossman@nga.org> is a senior policy analyst at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices Division of Employment and Social Services Policy Studies. Susan Gooden <mailto:susan.gooden@vt.edu> is an associate professor, Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blackburg, Virginia.
** To view the web version of this abstract, in printer friendly layout, go to:
<https://www.league.org/publication/abstracts/leadership/labs1202.html>
Dr. Susan Salvador
Office for Student Services
12/19/2002 |