Inclusion and Participation: A View of TANF and Higher Education Through Extended Case Analysis

Effects of Welfare Regime Change on Women’s Labor and Education: A Brief Overview

Under both AFDC and TANF regimes, families’ exits from welfare were typically short-lived. An analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) collected before PRWORA was implemented demonstrated that 75% of “leavers” (i.e., women who left welfare) experienced at least one transition into or out of poverty within the first 10 years after exit; many experienced several (Meyer & Cancian, 2001), which created economically unstable situations that often led to difficulties in other areas of life.

In Wisconsin, a state known for very strictly enforcing the newly established TANF’s work requirements, approximately 25% of women who left the program in 1997 returned to welfare within the first year. Twenty percent of those leavers returned within the first few months (Cancian et al., 2002). The vast majority (84%) of those who were removed from the welfare rolls in 1997 were employed in their first year after exit, but their earnings remained low, barely above what their income from welfare was. And while their income was derived largely from earnings, as the program intended, the loss of or reduction in benefits like childcare subsidies, Medicaid, and Food Stamps that they had previously qualified for by virtue of their eligibility for cash assistance typically were not replaced with work-related fringe benefits, thereby increasing leavers’ overall net hardship (Cancian et al., 2002).

Furthermore, as under AFDC, many TANF participants coped by working multiple jobs to make ends meet (Cancian et al., 2002; Edin & Lein, 1997), impacting family relationships and their mental and physical health. When the new, unprecedented 5-year lifetime limits on cash assistance arrived, having to exit TANF left many former recipients without education, safety net, stability or well-paying jobs, and—in the absence of an option to enroll in higher education—without much in the way of future prospects (Davis, 2002).

Extended Case Method in Policy Evaluation and Reform

Through the extended case method, circumstances of unusual cases are analyzed to determine what social processes converge at the individual level to explain how the particular situation likely evolved; a comparison may then be made with more “typical” cases and the results then applied to the original question (Kimball, 2019; Sullivan, 2002). Ultimately, this results in an examination of whether the questions being asked by the researcher are appropriate and how the bounds of the problem may need to be adjusted to account for ways in which the unusual case reflects the larger context that fostered it (Mladenović, 2021). Social welfare policy is an ideal arena for this exercise, with abundant data and examples of non-conforming cases (Kimball, 2019). For example, although Illinois welfare policy seemingly encourages participation in post-secondary education in the way it has been written and reauthorized over the years, the actual participation of a recipient as a student through the college option is rare and atypical (Floyd et al., 2017; Fusaro et al., 2021; Pavetti & Thompson, 2023; Walsh et al., 2024). In fact, the decision to not enroll is increasingly more common (Hetling et al., 2021). According to studies conducted within the past 5 years, even though progress is being made in the effort to support welfare beneficiaries enroll and persist in higher education—a handful of states currently operate programs specifically designed to assist those on public assistance attend college as partial fulfillment of the work requirements—enrollment by these parents is declining (Pavetti & Thompson, 2023) and overall hardship for these families is also rising (Fusaro et al., 2021).

Specific Benefits of Extended Case Method in the Context of Welfare Reform

According to Burawoy (1998), variation among the cases is analyzed to build on existing theory by “extending” the conceptual underpinnings and practical applications to a larger context. Unusual cases may be studied to identify social processes that converge for individuals to explain how the unique facets of their circumstances likely evolved; a comparison of these elements may then be made with more “typical” cases, and the results applied to the original question (Sullivan, 2002). This process allows us to deeply examine whether the research questions being asked are appropriate and how we may adjust the bounds of the problem to account for an array of perspectives on the larger context, as reflected by the unusual cases that it produced. For example, although TANF policy in Illinois at the outset of Welfare Reform seemed to support recipients’ choice to attend college to fulfill part of their work requirements, the actual participation of qualified recipients in post-secondary education is rare, or an unusual case (Pavetti & Thompson, 2023; Walsh et al., 2024). To compare the experiences of the student-recipients (i.e., those who formally used college attendance as part of their “work-first” program) with the more common experiences of “discouraged” or “interested” recipients—that is, those who were qualified but were either not allowed to count college hours as work or who said they would like to but had not pursued this avenue—may help to uncover the social processes and environmental circumstances that have to converge in order for the event (e.g., enrollment in college) to occur. Of particular interest in this analysis was the role that receiving welfare benefits played in facilitating enrollment in higher education for current and former recipients to reduce social exclusion for this population.

The extended case method facilitates a multilevel examination of the unusual case of the recipient-student, showing the intersections among the respondent, her community, her family, the institutions with which she is involved, and the policies regulating these interactions. The focus of this analysis is the role of the targeted social welfare programs that grant benefits to families, and how these programs function in the everyday experiences of the respondents to determine the potential for reducing social exclusion through access to opportunities via the college option in Illinois’ welfare policy.

While the findings from these interviews are not intended to be generalized to a larger population in the same way as results from large sample surveys, information and interpretations that emerge from extended case analysis can also provide important evidence to answer questions regarding potential selection bias that might define respondents’ experiences. For example, one might wonder about whether and how student-recipients’ responses to the constraints imposed by TANF rules and work-first policy, or other characteristics such as motivation to achieve or definition of success, might differ qualitatively from that of women who are interested in but do not pursue higher education while they are receiving public assistance. The Extended Case analysis can provide insight into any such differences and why they may or may not matter (Wadham & Warren, 2014). Additionally, focusing on the relative importance of individual versus structural explanations helps clarify and underscore the myriad ways social policy shapes individual experiences (Kimball, 2019). As a result, the information gained can highlight which aspects of policy and programs require more attention, from the perspective of the respondents. For example, in a mixed methods study, results from the quantitative study can uncover areas to spotlight in the qualitative inquiry; in this case, the combination of the quantitative results with the qualitative interviews may then be used to direct future research on the pathways between access to higher education through welfare policy and better outcomes for families (Sosulski & Lawrence, 2008).

Study Context and Research Questions

The question of how welfare policy, which changed in Illinois in the late 1990s to count post-secondary education toward partial fulfillment of the work requirements, affected exclusion for recipients was first addressed from the perspectives of the interview respondents. To do this, three anomalous case analyses (Shawn, Megan, and Paula), are highlighted to illustrate how attempts to fulfill the work requirements and decisions about returning to college may be influenced by Welfare Reform policies and their experiences participating in work-first welfare programs, including community service jobs, job search programs, paid work in the private sector, and the college option. Examples of the consequences of their decisions about welfare participation demonstrate ways that inclusion can be promoted or denied through policy and program interventions. Next, further questions concerning the cultural context of welfare were developed based on Eliasoph and Lichterman’s (1999) expansion of Burawoy’s (1998) method, which calls for moving beyond considering political implications in isolation and extending the analysis to include the social and cultural functions that policy serves.

The purpose of the current analysis was to explore: (1) how the culture and the social structure(s) of welfare interact with individual circumstances in Shawn’s, Megan’s, and Paula’s cases to shape their decisions about whether and how to participate in the work requirements, and (2) how Shawn’s, Paula’s, and Megan’s interpretations of their situations are delimited by cultural norms about work, welfare participation, college enrollment, and motherhood. And finally, (3) how do the three women’s ultimate decisions and actions reflect a kind of reconciliation of their own circumstances with the social ecological context of their engagement with welfare and other institutions?

Data and Sample

The sample of 15 women was drawn from the pool of female survey respondents who participated in all first three waves of the Illinois Families Study (IFS) in Chicago, Peoria, and the ring counties around Peoria, and were college eligible. Potential respondents were invited to participate based on characteristics that emerged as key to outcomes for the larger population, including race/ethnicity, their interest in and attempts to enroll in higher education, and whether they lived in a city or a less urban area. Respondents were also selected using the following criteria: If the respondent said that she had attended college after the survey began, she was placed in the “Student Group” and asked about her experiences with trying to mix welfare and post-secondary education, along with a set of general questions that were asked of all three groups. If, however, her survey responses indicated that she had attempted to enroll in college but was stopped for some reason (a screening question added to the third wave of the Illinois Families Study), she was included in a second group, called the “Discouraged Group” and asked to describe those experiences. A third group, called the “Interested Group,” included women who said in the initial wave of the Illinois Families Study that they had an interest in pursuing post-secondary education, but in subsequent waves of the survey (through Wave 3) never indicated that they had followed up on their interest or enrolled in classes toward a college degree.

Study Procedures

The first wave of qualitative interviews contained questions that were developed from the review of the literature and preliminary analyses of the IFS survey data. Questions in the survey relating to the women’s interest in pursuing higher education and any attempts they had made in that direction were also used to screen potential respondents for the in-depth interviews. The first semi-structured interview protocol concerned general experiences with work, welfare, and education, and was tailored to the level of education the respondent reported in the survey (i.e., whether she had ever enrolled or attempted to enroll in post-secondary education since the first wave of the survey).

For women who were able to enroll in college courses or finish a degree (several in the Illinois Families Study had earned associate’s degrees during the course of the study, since applying for welfare benefits), the qualitative interviews focused on what changed for them when they were able to attend college (especially whether the welfare system facilitated their efforts), whether they attributed these changes to the opportunity to go to school, and why. Additional questions related to other factors that may have played a part in the changes, such as their values around education, the availability of resources specifically dedicated to providing them with access to school or work, and their personal motivation. Specifically, respondents were asked to describe what it was like to combine work, welfare, and education along with their experiences of raising children and being part of community and family systems.

Through continued contact, attempts at member-checking were made during and upon completion of the data analysis, both in person and through written correspondence to increase the validity of the analysis and my interpretations. Once the first set of interviews was complete, a summary of the findings was provided to the respondents to obtain their feedback and elicit further responses. A subsequent round of face-to-face interviews was conducted with all but one of the respondents, during which I followed up on previous responses to determine if there had been any changes to their situations, such as the circumstances influencing their decisions about college attendance. The respondents were also asked more specific questions about their individual experiences, based on details from the first interviews and patterns that emerged in the quantitative analyses. Additionally, I pursued more of the theoretical constructs, such as respondents’ ideas about social and civic participation, social exclusion, and inclusion that were less emphasized in the first interview because the initial round focused on gaining information about her actual experiences with welfare and as a student. Also included were explicit questions about policy implications, the specific roles of institutions, and experiences of racial and gender discrimination in education, work, and welfare policy.

All of the women consented to having the interviews audiotaped; these were transcribed verbatim and compared with handwritten notes taken before, during, and talking with the respondents. The information was then organized into categories based on themes, such as actual experiences with welfare and education; interactions with family, community organizations, and institutions; and respondents’ definitions of “access” and “barriers” to education and well-being. Each respondent who completed a second interview received a set of these preliminary results in the form of written summaries for her feedback; the respondents’ written answers were entered as data into the analysis, noting changes, corrections, and differences between her interpretation of the interview and mine. Finally, notes from the second interview were added, introducing new themes as they emerged and comparing the cases for similar processes and experiences, using elements of human capital, social capital, and social exclusion theories to explain similarities and differences to account for all of the women’s experiences.

Analysis

The use of Extended Case Method (ECM) in this study facilitated a policy-focused analysis to evaluate how the work-first approach in Welfare Reform helped or hindered women’s pursuit of their educational goals, and whether the policy was effective in meeting their needs. ECM is effective because it highlights cases that are unusual to show how individuals’ seemingly atypical circumstances, in actuality, uncover ways that common cultural, social, and political practices interact to shape people’s everyday experiences. For the Access to Education Project (AEP), I chose cases that were unusual in the sample of 15 women, in terms of their experiences with education and the welfare work requirements, and which mirrored the unusual case of recipients in the larger welfare population who were able to enroll in higher education—those who may or may not have been offered the “college option” but were nonetheless faced with the choice of whether to pursue this avenue within the system, by challenging the system (if/when denied or stymied), or to give up trying. I present these unusual cases to demonstrate how the details of their stories reveal some of the underlying processes that operate within certain social contexts to facilitate or obstruct access to higher education and, by extension, opportunities for inclusion through welfare and work.

The analytic methods used in the AEP combined deductive and inductive techniques to uncover a wealth of information related to extant themes in the literature and previous studies of welfare and Welfare Reform, as well as generating themes derived organically from the women’s responses. This practical approach is common among qualitative and mixed methods researchers (Bingham & Witkowsky, 2022; de Marrais et al., 2024).

Theme 1: Beyond Resistance—Welfare Structure and Decisions About Higher Education

The first analytic theme centered on whether and how the respondents’ decisions about enrollment in post-secondary education can be seen as a response to the bounds imposed on them through participation in the welfare system. Although differences in policy implementation through individual welfare offices’ programs certainly influence decisions about the return to school, all the respondents recognized that workers operate within the constraints of broader policy directives. The overall sense of the women was that the caseworkers’ primary goal, based on the work-first philosophy of Welfare Reform, was to drive recipients out of the welfare system and terminate cases as quickly as possible. Several respondents said they were told this explicitly by workers; others said it was the feeling they got as their caseworkers rushed through appointments and were careless with details about individual cases.

Some respondents recognized that caseworkers are often overworked and have little time or energy to keep a very close eye on individual cases. However, the respondents said that the attitude of the caseworkers was generally one of blaming the client and feeling inconvenienced by recipients’ demands, rather than frustrated with the system or their own inability as caseworkers to pay more personal attention to clients. As Paula observed:

Interviewer: So when you were… goin’ down to the public aid office, did they ever tell you, like… what your options were about going to school? Did they ever say…?

Paula was eventually removed from cash aid and she lost in-kind benefits at different points while she was a student, even though she worked full-time during the entire period at the same factory job. Nonetheless, the respondents agreed that although some individual caseworkers thwarted their chances to return to school, the problems they experienced could ultimately be traced to the structure of the public aid system.

The main response of the women to this situation is perhaps not surprising: The respondents desired mostly to separate themselves from the welfare system, the stigma attached to public aid, and the treatment they received from the caseworkers. If, indeed, a goal of Welfare Reform was to reduce caseloads, then this is evidence of the system’s consistency with this goal. Interestingly, however, women in this sample who would pursue post-secondary education left welfare most quickly and seemed the most determined never to return. This contrasts with those who left welfare for paid work, who were more likely to say that they would return to public aid if they felt they had to (Sosulski, 2004).

Shawn, for example, was able to persist in college, despite being explicitly denied welfare benefits because she insisted on continuing to attend school rather than participate in the job search/training program to which she was assigned. Shawn was the only respondent in the sample of 15 who participated in the college option: Upon finding out that Shawn was attending college full-time, her caseworker initially allowed her to continue in her Associate’s degree program using the college option. After about 6 months, though, the worker imposed additional work requirements (i.e., attending a job training program), without notice that the fulfillment criteria would change before Shawn finished her degree. This was possible because welfare caseworkers had the discretion to alter requirements mid-program; but this happened without warning, in this case.

Nevertheless, to meet the new work requirements, Shawn did attempt to enroll in a job training program (in addition to her college courses)—but not the one she had been assigned to by the welfare office. She perceived that program to be inferior, as it offered few connections to the community and good jobs, in her view. Shawn explained that she had attempted college once before, but didn’t last because she was young and did not know exactly what she wanted:

Shawn: At first when I went [to college] it was just like ok, I’m gonna go to school and I wasn’t-- I ain’t gonna say I wasn’t serious… I was serious but it wasn’t… let’s see… it wasn’t a priority for me, you know what I’m sayin’, a big priority it was just like, ok I’m goin’ to school I’m doin’ somethin’, you know what I’m saying? Now it’s like, I need to get outa there. (laughs) I'm ready to graduate…

Shawn thus fell out of compliance with the work requirements. She was sanctioned and her benefits ended, after less than 1 year of college attendance. She persisted in school with the help of work-study and money from a settlement from a civil suit; but this money was depleted not long after. Her family and friends also contributed some, but she lived with her 11-year-old daughter in an apartment in a poor area of the city, with broken locks and sometimes no utilities. She hoped to graduate the following May, after 5 years of part-time school and part-time work, with her Associate’s degree in human and social services. In contrast to Shawn’s story, most of the other women who said they were interested in post-secondary education had not enrolled in classes since the survey started. Many indicated they did not enroll precisely because they anticipated this kind of outcome and would not risk starting college only to be forced to choose between public assistance and school.

One major influence on respondents’ decision to not enroll seems to lie in their experiences with institutions outside of welfare. With only a few exceptions, students generally reported positive transitions from the welfare system to institutions of higher education, including opportunities to meet new people and feel supported in their environment. Participants who entered the paid workforce, on the other hand, generally did not talk about the move to a workplace as more positive than being on welfare, except in one case: Megan had relatively positive experiences with the changes associated with Welfare Reform and was the only respondent who said that she benefited from participating in a community service job that served as her work requirement fulfillment. She was not offered the chance to return to school, possibly because the college option did not exist in its current form. Instead, she was given a temporary job in a county office where she was trained to do the same work as the other county clerical employees at the entry-level. Furthermore, Megan was actively assisted in moving from her CSJ when it ended after several months to regular paid employment in a private, family-owned company, doing similar kinds of work. She remained at this job for several years and had job security if the company continued to do well; she was optimistic for the future, and while she said that earning a degree would feel like an accomplishment and perhaps bolster her resume, she was able to make plans without it, as she explained:

Interviewer: When I say “long-term goals,” what comes into your head?

Several characteristics of Megan’s case were atypical. For example, Megan’s account of individualized supervision and mentoring from the administrator at the county agency was remarkable: Her supervisor regularly tutored her in typing and gave her lessons in record-keeping and other advanced clerical tasks that one might learn through taking an entry-level accounting class. The individual, respectful attention she received from her welfare caseworker, as well as the communication between the welfare and county agencies to find Megan her CSJ and current job were rare, especially in this sample.

Essentially, Megan’s experience of daily lessons in business skills seems to parallel those of students in certificate and 2-year programs at community colleges. However, because she had not earned a degree, she lacked academic credentials to qualify her for another job at the same level, should her current position end. Nevertheless, Megan was confident enough in her current position that she was unlikely to consider a return to school anytime soon. Like Shawn, Megan valued the opportunity to go to school and understood the commitment it would take:

Interviewer: Um, do you feel like you’re ready to go back to college?

Another notable aspect of this case is that Megan took a CSJ offered through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) relatively early in the program. It may be that a high investment was made in early cases to ensure the success of clients, as ample resources were initially available and interest in the new program was high. Also, because this was the early stages of post-1997 Welfare Reform implementation in Illinois, the post-secondary education opportunity did not exist as it does today and was not an option in the same way as work-first choices. Even though Megan said that from the outset of TANF, she was only marginally interested in returning to college “at some point” and mainly for personal fulfillment rather than economic necessity, the elements of Megan’s experiences that helped her most are notably similar to those of formal education and training described by students in later years of Welfare Reform. For example, Megan discussed why she thought higher education was an important option for women in the public aid system to have:

Megan: and, I think some of these women, like, especially you know, the ones that are in the housing project, they don’t – they’re not gonna make … connections, I mean, it’s just … it’s hard. I mean, I think education helps, goes a long way, too--

Megan was strongly in favor of the college option through welfare and for giving women who “made mistakes” when they were younger to have a second chance to go to college. However, in the early years, Illinois TANF did not support clients’ returning to college as a viable “work-like activity” but the case that most closely simulated a formal educational experience helped the recipient leave the welfare system more confident of long-term success. This quality of job training experience is unique among the women interviewed for the Access to Education Project.

Recipients’ effort to create their own success stories is a form of resistance to a system that may be too large and impersonal to meet each client’s needs. Most of the respondents in the sample of 15 had left welfare, although some still relied on in-kind benefits. However, many of the women—both students and workers—conveyed a sense of having left welfare to escape an oppressive system and make their own way, with greater autonomy and self-determination. They expressed great disappointment in the system to which they had turned for help in their most desperate times. Students (vs. workers/non-students) were more likely to talk about hope for the future with some confidence, even as they struggled in the present. They experienced greater feelings of self-determination because of the choices they felt higher education would provide, although job opportunities were still largely determined, they felt, by the economic climate. They expressed the belief that post-secondary education should help them get better jobs and would give them an advantage, unless the job market was too depressed to support workers. This was not always the case.

Paula’s experience is noteworthy, because she was able to attend college as a recipient post-Welfare Reform, but without the knowledge and support of her welfare caseworker. She decided to complete an Associate’s degree while receiving cash assistance for a time, then found full-time employment and relied on in-kind benefits while also taking classes full-time. She earned a degree in human services, and she has tried without success to find a job “… helping people, because that is my [her] ‘call.’”

Despite considerable volunteer experience in human service agencies and an extended job search, Paula was not able to find a job in her field of study. Instead, she kept her full-time job as a factory worker to support her family of two teen-age children and one adult child, who was a student at one of the city’s technical colleges. Although Paula sometimes worried that she would not be able to find a job that uses her training, she persisted and had once again started taking college classes, in hopes that returning to college once again to pursue computer science training would make her college degree more marketable:

Interviewer: What are you going to school for?

Paula hoped that these skills-building courses, in addition to ultimately achieving a master’s degree in Social Work, would help her use her practical experience and qualify her for a position in a shelter or other service agency. At the time of the second interview, she was still paying off student loan debt from her previous enrollment; Paula also planned to help finance her children’s post-secondary education, so she is unwilling to take on more student loans for herself. Low-income families face this dilemma regarding trade-offs among long- and short-term educational investments, where and in whom to invest, even today; and the specter of lifelong student loan debt burden is prohibitive (Kimball, 2019).

Several aspects of Paula’s case are instructive: While going to college, Paula was motivated to work and able to depend on her factory job to support her and her family through school. However, while the low-skilled job she obtained paid her enough to cover her bills, it did not allow her to “get ahead.” Furthermore, skills she learned on this job were not easily translated to another, and so her future was uncertain if she were to lose her job. Had the welfare system been more supportive of her decision to pursue higher education initially, she believed, she and her family would not have been facing their current difficulties. She would also be able to afford the rest of the education she required more easily, on her own. And because she still relied on Food Stamps and Medicaid, Paula worried that she might have to return to TANF if her circumstances changed and she strongly asserted that she did not trust that welfare would support her education. As a result, she would not attempt to return to school while receiving welfare without significant encouragement and financial support, even if the college option were offered. Though the circumstances varied, Paula and Shawn experienced very similar outcomes.

Discussion: Theme 1

The three experiences described above represent unusual cases that illustrate and mark in bold relief an array of problems that arise from both policy and implementation. Since the inception of Welfare Reform, the system has generated environments in which some recipients feel they must be closeted students and take on excessive responsibilities in order to work full-time, study enough to persist and graduate, and care for their families. Caseworkers have been able to deny clients the opportunity to count school as a work activity and were often not required to or held accountable for informing clients of their options, such as enrolling in post-secondary education (Monnat, 2010). Resistance by recipients who try to both meet work requirements and attend school without the caseworkers’ knowledge or by leaving the welfare system entirely place the client in precarious, sometimes untenable positions of making choices between short-term survival and long-term success, further narrowing their opportunities in the future (Medwinter & Burton, 2018). Alternatively, providing recipients with a broader array of choices for meeting the work requirements could allow the system and caseworkers the flexibility to “individualize” case management to maximize client self-determination. If they have all the information about the option to attend school, welfare recipients can weigh the sacrifices they would have to make as students against the long-term benefits of starting down the road to higher education. While the welfare system may not be equipped to support recipient-students beyond earning one degree, reaching this goal would give the recipient credentials that she can use to find jobs and build on over time. To increase participation in higher education, the option to go to school must be supported by caseworkers and a system that recognizes that the demands of school—while not necessarily more challenging than a full-time job—may be perceived as riskier by recipients, who may not trust that they will be allowed to concentrate on school for the time needed to persist to graduation.

The chief limitation of the welfare system noted by respondents was a sense that the cash benefits a family can receive is too small to live on, even for basic survival. A lack of financial security, in general, was a common reason women delayed a return to school. But many said that they would never consider attempting to go to school while relying primarily on cash aid, because they would have to spend so much time finding ways to supplement this income and pay their bills that they would have no time to concentrate on their studies and would surely fail.

The five principles of social exclusion theory can be evaluated, then, in light of these three unusual cases. First, (a) “valued recognition of the person” was an issue for all three women. Regarding self-determination, none of the three felt that they had much choice about the way that they would fulfill the work requirements. Megan went on to jobs in which she said that she was respected and served her personal needs; but the other two women had to make radical adjustments in their goals and expectations for their families’ well-being to pursue their long-term objectives. Many respondents noted that they are stereotyped and that a resulting lack of respect from others hinders their progress.

In terms of (b) human development, all three women eventually gained education and training, but at a price. Megan indefinitely delayed returning to college; Shawn and Paula made many sacrifices because they did not strictly adhere to the work-first policy. The definition of (c) “involvement and engagement” can be quite broad. But narrowly defined as involvement in social systems and the workforce, Megan fared the best—yet her future may have been most uncertain because she lacked formal education. The sacrifices that Paula made to go to school primarily involved her children and the time she felt she needed to spend with them. Because her sisters were able to assist with childcare, Paula felt that her family was not permanently harmed; but she was unwilling to compromise her role as a mother by both working and attending school full-time. Shawn’s sacrifice appeared in the form of serious deficiencies in (d) material well-being. Despite being able to continue in school, she and her daughter continued to live in desperate poverty and dangerous circumstances. Because of the lack of sufficiently compensating local job opportunities, however, Shawn said that she would not have been better off by attending the job training program specified by the welfare office, even if it had led to a job.

Paula’s family was doing somewhat better economically than in the past, but still relied on in-kind benefits (especially Food Stamps) to make ends meet. Megan was financially stable at the time but said that she was only able to maintain her standard of living as long as the economy was strong. She was concerned about what might happen if she lost her job or separated from her partner. The fifth principle, (e) proximity to resources, did not arise as a major issue for any of the women. However, Megan, who lived in a somewhat less populated area than the other two, may have benefited from participating in a smaller work-first CSJ program through which she was able to get more individualized attention. Paula, who lived in Chicago, was closer to the college where she attended classes than she was to her job, and it took half the time for her to get to school as it did to travel to work, she said.

Theme 2: A “Culture of Despair”

Having described the women’s situations in terms of how the work-first welfare policies affected their decisions to return to school in the context of a political, exclusion-based analysis, social and cultural exclusion are taken up in the following theme.

Intersections of Culture, Social Structure, and Respondents’ Lived Experiences

The culture that welfare recipients enter when they engage with the U.S. public aid system requires developing a consciousness that was perhaps new for these respondents. As Paula described it, many recipients talked about the environment of welfare as what I summed up as a “culture of despair,” resulting in feelings of disempowerment associated with and created at the outset by the welfare benefits application process. The awareness that one is moving into foreign territory where the caseworkers understand the rules and may have exclusive power to determine the path one takes can be intimidating, especially for those with less well-developed self-advocacy skills or connections to people who can help them. Using an extended case analysis provides additional opportunities to understand what happens when people gain greater consciousness about the systems in which they are immersed, how these cultural and social structures interact (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 1999), and the skills the women developed through the process to help them navigate life in the welfare system. Paula, for example, was stymied in her efforts to return to school though the college option was technically available to her. She said that she could not afford to pursue this route because the monthly grant check would not have been enough to live on and the reporting requirements seemed to her to be unreasonable:

Paula: And, and with the school thing, I never did what they said, no way.

Paula decided to continue on with the welfare system for the time being, which she managed by dropping out of school until she found herself on better financial footing and was no longer obligated to stretch herself to meet her caseworkers’ strict interpretations of the welfare work requirements to “get a job, any job.”

By contrast, Shawn responded to these demands by trying to play by the rules but was not able to satisfy the work requirements in a way that made sense to her. Once she realized that she could not be certain that new work requirements would not be imposed on her again, she decided to leave the welfare system altogether. She was unlikely to achieve her goals if she was required to participate in narrowly defined, extracurricular activities like job searches and full-time work outside of school. She said that in the past, she had prioritized paid employment over school, just as the work-first policies do; but without employment opportunities that paid enough to live on, she decided that the risk of full-time school, even without assistance from welfare cash benefits, was her best chance for success in the long run. A side benefit for Shawn was that she was also able to model persistence and success in school for her child, as well as expanding her personal worldview:

Interviewer: … Has your relationship with [your daughter] changed since you’ve gone to school, do you think?

Shawn’s experience suggests that a cultural shift occurs for women when they participate in post-secondary education, helping them to further develop their critical consciousness, which informs their choices and provides options for new ways of relating to their families and the community. In this case, Shawn told me that college raised her awareness about issues that Black families overall face and it made a difference in her ideas about motherhood, power, and her role in the larger social structure. In the end, the policies and organization of the welfare system, which gave caseworkers the authority to change clients’ programs and impose sanctions for noncompliance at will, was unworkable for Shawn. The stipulation that allowed “caseworker discretion” to pre-empt recipients’ choices meant that Shawn was not able to determine her path for herself or negotiate with her caseworker toward a compromise that satisfied them both.

Paula’s progress, too, was hindered by the culture and structure of welfare. Although working full-time and going to school full-time was exhausting and took away from time that Paula could spend with her children, she found it easier to meet the work requirements without approaching the caseworker to request the college option. Making such a request felt risky, given that her caseworker had not offered the college option even when she became aware of Paula’s student status when she applied for in-kind benefits. Being “hard-headed”—as Paula earlier called herself for being assertive—can mean being characterized as non-compliant and receiving punitive sanctions; her consciousness about welfare’s focus on work over education influenced her choice to not actively pursue higher education, and she continued to struggle financially. At some point, though, Paula said, she was determined to re-enroll; it was important for her to provide for her children and be a good role model:

Paula: … I, I gotta do what I got to do to better myself, so that I can set a good example for my children. And if I want better for them, I got to work and go to school, so that I can get a decent enough job to get those nice things, like, a house… a nice neighborhood, you know, and those things don’t come easy to a single parent.

On the other hand, Megan’s experience was one of relative comfort within the culture of the CSJ placement, in a county office with daily instruction. She did not say that she was able to choose her placement, but she felt fortunate to have been assigned to a trustworthy and caring supervisor. Like Shawn, Megan was directed to obtain job training, but was subsequently treated with respect. Furthermore, the placement and her current jobs also worked well with the expectations that Megan had of herself with respect to motherhood and marriage, which bolstered her optimism that her situation would continue to improve, based on the path she chose to follow through public assistance. Megan also acknowledged her own privilege, which allowed her perhaps more and better choices than other welfare participants faced in the economy of the time, which overall was strong but supported fewer opportunities for well-paying jobs with the kind of growth potential she enjoyed:

Megan: There’s… so many places hurtin’ for people to work right now. They can, I mean--. Some, like… I mean, I don't know, I wouldn’t personally take a job at McDonald’s, and I can see nobody wantin’ to take a job there, either… but I mean, there’s, there’s not a lot of good-paying jobs, and anymore sometimes I think it’s even who you know more than what you know. I mean, that’s how I got my job, I knew the owners. That's how [my partner] got his job, his brother was one of the bosses, I mean …

Ultimately, Megan trusted that she would be able to keep her job, work, and receive benefits to take care of her children in a relatively low-cost neighborhood, and—perhaps most importantly to her—not be identified in her job as a welfare recipient, but treated like any other worker, she said.

Discussion: Theme 2

As these stories illustrate, there is a great deal of tension around the issue of “valued recognition of the person” in the welfare system. Recipients are aware of the stigma attached to applying for welfare, which can disempower the applicant and has the potential to accentuate gender stereotypes based on the idea that single women are incapable of self-sufficiency; this may be especially acute if they have trouble finding paid work in a work-first environment, like Shawn and Paula did. At the same time, the experience may reinforce identification with the mother role, because she is consciously “doing what she has to” to take care of her children, as several respondents expressed; this may lead to greater exclusion, as Saraceno (2001) explains, “… women may be excluded from employment and other forms of social participation not because they are up-rooted or with weak, or loose, social networks, but because they are too strictly embedded—included—in family networks and obligations. … Further, while welfare dependency is increasingly seen as a cause of social exclusion (or negative inclusion), dependency on one’s own family resources is not, particularly in the case of women and the young.”

Women living in poverty are thus involved in a system in which they cannot participate without the status and identity of motherhood, yet this role is challenged by the system that undermines their ability to provide for her children, unless she has strong social networks flush with resources, according to several respondents. Megan’s case deviated from this pattern because she had a positive educational experience in her CSJ. Shawn and Paula identified primarily as students; and it was this identification, rather than adherence to work-first policies, that led them out of the welfare system.

Many of the respondents characterized welfare, along with other systems in which they and other people living in poverty are often involuntarily involved, in terms akin to those describing prisons—as a system that marginalizes and stigmatizes its participants unfairly and leads to long-term exclusion. Additionally, conflict arises between the caseworker and the recipient when the two disagree about the policy and the appropriate role of the recipient: worker, mother, and/or student. For example, two respondents in the sample of 15 prioritized full-time, stay-at-home motherhood above higher education and paid work outside the home, even after their youngest children reached the age when the state required them to work.

Conceptual disagreement between TANF participants and caseworkers about what roles are appropriate for women receiving benefits (i.e., mother, worker, student) has practical implications because it is essential to decisions the women make whether to participate in welfare using the college option. Caseworkers have the power to deny this path to any recipients, regardless of her interest or credentials. However, this disagreement, although occasionally attributed to a lack of involvement or motivation on the part of individual caseworkers, is seen by many recipients as a flaw in the welfare system. The public aid system is perceived as proscribing flexibility and encouraging workers to withhold information, inhibiting open communication between the worker and client, encouraging a culture of mutual distrust. The main goal of Welfare Reform—as communicated through the media and the workers, themselves—was to remove people from the rolls, rather than to provide a sustainable income, help recipients find living-wage jobs, or help them take care of their families in ways that make sense to them.

In order to change this dynamic, several policy changes could occur, such as expanding the choice sets for recipients to include more educational activities that count toward fulfillment of the work requirements. To be more inclusive, the guidelines could be called “activity” or “participation” requirements. Additionally, a key step is to increase the information flow to recipients/participants from the caseworkers. The object of this type of policy design is to develop cooperative helping relationships that starts with accounting for recipients’ individual situations and allows them to determine the most feasible route for their own progress, in consultation with caseworkers who are knowledgeable about the economic landscape, labor market, and education and training opportunities. This could ease potentially problematic reliance on a basic, inflexible set of rules with which the recipient must comply but provides little guidance for the caseworker in decision-making. The opportunity presents itself to initiate a cultural shift toward more client-centered, empowering practice because both caseworkers and clients can be supplied with more materials to build a supportive path out of welfare.

Respondents Interpret Their Situations According to Societal Norms and Values

How people interpret their situations determines, in part, how they will respond (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 1999). For example, many of the women were concerned that they were judged by caseworkers and the general public based on stereotypes about welfare recipients and felt that they were not trusted. Some respondents believed that they had little power to change stereotypes or influence the structure of welfare; yet they resisted by maintaining careful control of the information their caseworkers had about their activities. Tensions often existed because although most respondents noted that individual attention was an essential part of good case management, they were unwilling to divulge many details about their circumstances for fear that caseworkers would exploit the information. It became clear throughout the interviews that when respondents talked about “individualization” in casework, they meant self-determination, or the ability to choose for themselves the routes they take through the work requirements so that they could eventually leave the system.

In addition, while communication among agencies was cited by some respondents as a crucial element of comprehensive care, they also maintained that information about individual clients should not be made openly available to cooperating agencies, such as between the welfare office and a community college. The respondents perceived danger in being exposed to outside agents like child protective services or the criminal justice system that could take advantage of the information and use it to the family’s disadvantage. Thus, cooperation among agencies—though important for clients who need or want aid in multiple arenas—may be problematic if recipients are suspicious that their personal information is being shared between workers without their knowledge or permission. Here, too, responsibility may fall on the system to educate caseworkers about not only welfare rules but also how the educational system works, to help them build skills and knowledge to successfully refer clients and connect them with community resources. For this to be effective, the system must provide caseworkers with the time and resources to fulfill the mission of comprehensive care and relationship-building.

Furthermore, the respondents made decisions about returning to school based on their estimation of how they lived up to societal norms and values about work, education, welfare use, and motherhood. As described above, Shawn, Megan, and Paula all valued work above all other activities, as long as it provided them with the living they needed to make to take care of their families, which was their foremost priority. When Shawn could not find employment that paid a living wage, she prioritized going to college over continuing to try to find a job, so that she could provide a more promising future for her child. She took the risk of disclosing her school activities to her caseworker, hoping that she would find ongoing support for education until she graduated. Later, however, she had trouble even when she applied for Food Stamps because she was reluctant to disclose information about her situation, in this instance about how she was paying to live in an apartment where her grandmother was the landlady.

Paula was determined to follow the rules that were presented to her and “not make waves,” and was the most explicit of the three about the dangers of sharing too much information with caseworkers. The idea of greater inter-agency cooperation was quite disturbing to her, because of the lack of control over the release of her personal information, including her work, education, and welfare history. Because she met the work requirements through paid work, she thought that her other activities were not of concern to the welfare office. She thus met all her perceived social responsibilities, though it seems that she may have sacrificed an efficient route to her goals of earning a post-secondary degree and obtaining a better job.

Similarly, though Megan felt as though she lacked some self-determination in the process of being assigned to a CSJ, and she never discussed her interest in post-secondary education with her caseworker. Instead, she thought that maintaining a strict “work ethic” would pay off, and so was willing to accept the trade-off. She eventually found a job with a sustainable wage and family-friendly working conditions that allowed her to put her family first. Thus, her interest in returning to school at the time that she participated in the interview for the Access to Education Project was largely for reasons of personal interest rather than need. However, she recognized that her situation could change, and she might have to re-evaluate her priorities. She anticipated that she would not take the college option, however, or return to welfare for the college option because of the stigma associated with welfare receipt.

Respondents Reconcile Individual Circumstances with the Social Ecological Context

For Shawn, Paula, and Megan, decisions about how to meet the work requirements and whether to return to school were attempts to make the best situations they could, given their circumstances. Once Shawn decided that going to college was the best effort she could make to get ahead and make long-term changes in her circumstances, she asserted herself and tried to advocate for herself with her caseworker to use the college option. She faced several barriers through welfare, and though she succeeded in staying in school by getting some financial aid in the form of grants and a half-time work study job, she and her daughter continued to live in extreme poverty.

Paula attended college and persisted until graduation for her first post-secondary degree but had to work full-time and sacrifice time with her children to do it. Though she worked full-time, her job was not in her major field of study and she still had difficulty making ends meet. Like Shawn, Paula’s motivation stemmed from wanting to eventually find a satisfying, good-paying job and provide a better future for her children. Paula also wanted to make enough money so that she no longer needed targeted benefits like Food Stamps and medical assistance. She said that she relied on a less-satisfying job and in-kind benefits out of necessity, not by choice.

Megan, similarly, initially applied for welfare and deferred any plans for returning to school not by choice, but because she needed assistance and welfare was specific in its work requirements. However, she was fortunate that her participation in a CSJ through welfare led directly to full-time, sustainable employment, thus inclusion in the labor market. Megan strongly identified as a mother and a worker; she did not advocate for herself to be able to attend school, but took the only option offered her through welfare to qualify for aid. While at the time of the interviews she was in the best position of the three women economically, she had the least education and credentials to fall back on, should she ever lose her job or if her partner relationship—which also contributed to her economic well-being—should break up. In either case, Megan said that she would more seriously consider a return to school but would not agree to participate in the college option through welfare.

Furthermore, there is a clear relationship evident between identity, oppression, and the ability to assert oneself to acquire the information and resources necessary to achieve educational goals. It appears as though women who advocated strongly for themselves tended to attribute problems that they and other recipients encountered to structural flaws they observed in the public aid system, mediated by caseworkers’ implementation of policies. There was an apparent association between respondents’ delayed attempts to go to college and their recognition of barriers, especially those related to access to higher education, which were seen to originate in “problem caseworkers” or in recipients who choose to be uncooperative. That is, a structural analysis of the problems in the welfare system appeared to relate to conclusions that education is rarely possible within the constraints of welfare policy, which therefore led to pursuit of education outside of the system with consequent poorer outcomes. Greater participation in higher education on the part of welfare recipients, it seems, is perhaps only possible with confidence that the system has changed substantially in ways that will support them for the sustained, if relatively brief, period required for them to complete a degree program.

Implications for Policy and Research

This study drew together analyses of the exceptional experiences of a few cases compared with the more common experiences among the 15 women who participated in the Access to Education Project to facilitate discussions about the development of innovative social welfare policy and practice concerning higher education. To cultivate an effective helping relationship, “starting where the clients are” involves determining what factors are most influential in helping them make decisions about participating in work, welfare, and education in the context of their unique circumstances. Understanding the dynamics of social capital development, alongside clients’ perspectives on policy and its role in their decision-making, is critical to assisting people negotiate systems, advocate for themselves, and formulate plans that support progress toward achievable goals and greater inclusion.

In thinking about policy implications, using targeted welfare programs (e.g., cash assistance and in-kind benefits like Food Stamps and medical assistance) and education could help reduce poverty and exclusion (Wang, 2021), but the work-first philosophy does not easily encompass higher education (Hetling et al., 2015). Walraven and colleagues (2000) suggest that exclusion-reducing solutions may involve changing the form of services and support to “shift in focus from averages to distribution of access and achievements”—that is, altering the overall goal, or the perception of the goal—of welfare policy from “get a job, any job” to a focus on increasing positive outcomes for the greatest number of recipients, especially those who are hardest to serve and face the greatest risk of social exclusion (Wang, 2021).

Indeed, if the welfare office environment matters, then the culture of welfare can be changed to be more inclusive, promising hope rather than engendering despair (Medwinter & Burton, 2018). If caseworkers are, theoretically, allowed unrestricted discretion yet practically bound by cultural norms about work—rather than assisted by well-defined policies around education and training participation—then shifting focus toward clients’ self-determination and inclusion could ease the burden on caseworkers presiding over clients’ destinies (Monnat, 2010; Wang, 2021).

Although critics of ECM may argue that the results of analysis by extended case are not generalizable in the same sense as quantitative research methods (Burawoy, 1998), it is essential to note that they are not intended for this purpose. Rather, the aim is to provide multiple, alternative explanations for phenomena that more holistically encapsulate and accurately reflect the range of lived experiences that real people have. Others have claimed that ECM relies too heavily on deductive aspects of analysis or that the analyst may fall prey to convenient decontextualizing the data to fit existing theory without significantly adding innovative or meaningful theoretical insights (Wadham & Warren, 2014). The use of ECM in the Access to Education Project, however, explicitly addresses such concerns through the intentional use of combined inductive and deductive techniques to reinterpret social exclusion—a theory that is not typically considered in the context of U.S. domestic policy—in the context of American higher education and welfare policy. As Levenson and Seim (2024) suggest, the complex reflexivity inherent to ECM and its sister ethnographic approaches ultimately provide greater innovation and flexibility in research; and this increased agility facilitates our understanding of and ability to confront “challenges to context and meaning in policy evaluation” (Kimball, 2019) to build more effective responses.

For example, the results from this examination suggest that shifting the center of underlying assumptions about the work requirements from a moralistic “personal responsibility” position, in which the burden rests squarely on recipients, to one of mutual obligation by the person and the state would fit better with clients’ perspectives and encourage more active engagement (vs. active resistance). Moreover, highlighting the ways in which clients understand their own stories in light of social capital- and social exclusion-related constructs rather than focusing on gaining education or work experience alone, provides support for the idea that reducing exclusion requires looking “beyond human capital formulation to psychological and social resources underpinning social and cultural capital to sum to … identity capital, the key protection against adult social exclusion” (Walraven et al., 2000). There is a call for increasing “user involvement” in policy development and research (Haw, 2000), which is embodied in the respondents’ suggestions for policy change. As Shawn commented:

Shawn: I’m addressing this to the public aid people … They need-- they need to reform the Reform because it’s not workin’. It’s evident that it’s not working. They tell you to have, maintain a 2.0 GPA and C average and you do that and it’s still… they can come back and tell you to work 20 hours… . Then, you work 20 hours they come back and tell you you gotta quit school. You-- you put me in school, now you want to take me outta there. That's not fair. That's not right. And they don’t give enough support to people in school. That’s what I mean by, I mean… you know, they don’t give enough support, at all… .