2-Year Schools Brace for Welfare Reform

The prospect of being forced to quit school just when she was getting on track toward a good education and long-term employment is not what scares community college student Luisa Ruiz the most about welfare reform.

It’s the job she may have to take to satisfy the new law’s requirement that recipients find employment within two years.

“What’s out there? McDonald’s? Del Taco? I don’t see how we’re going to get off welfare and stay off welfare if we move on with no skills. We’ll be right back where we started,” said Ruiz, a high school dropout who needs two more years to complete her associate’s degree and transfer to a four-year school. “We are scared our dreams might be taken away.”

Fretting too are the people who run Ruiz’s school, Rancho Santiago College, the largest and poorest in the county.

Its two campuses in Santa Ana and Orange enroll nearly 40,000 students, a little more than half of whom live at or below the poverty line. And students like Ruiz, 31, who sought a better life through education, now find themselves contemplating cutting their studies short for fast-food jobs and the like.

Community colleges are being counted on to train vast numbers of people for employment to help meet the demands of the welfare law enacted last year by Congress.

The federal law gave states wide latitude to design their own welfare plans, and Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed cutting off assistance after one year for new recipients and two for current ones. After that, people would have to get a job. There would be a five-year lifetime limit.

The Legislature is currently wrangling over the governor’s proposal, but it now includes $53 million for community colleges to expand or develop new programs to prepare recipients for work.

But Rancho Santiago officials are skeptical that their share of the money will be enough, and they wonder if it’s possible to move people through the system fast enough to meet the welfare law’s work requirements.

Already, it takes most students three to four years to complete their studies because most need remedial education and basic skills training before they take on regular course work. And now, administrators fear, some of the 3,700 students on welfare may have to sacrifice education to take a job that would pay too little.

Child-care facilities on campus barely meet the needs of current students, much less any others that may enroll to train for jobs.

And college officials have no idea if promised state funding will be enough to cover the costs of retooling programs or devising new ones to ensure new students who are on welfare can finish within the one year they are receiving public assistance.

Vivian Blevins, chancellor of the Rancho Santiago Community College District, has a way of summing the situation up: “It’s just an upside-downward, inappropriate way to address a major issue.”

State community college officials analyzing the law don’t cast the situation in such bleak terms, but they do raise similar concerns for the 106 colleges statewide, in which 139,000 welfare recipients are enrolled--about 10% of the total student population.

On a more positive note, they relish the idea that two-year institutions will play such an important role in carrying out the law.

The downside, in their view: The $53 million earmarked for community colleges would come from Proposition 98 funding, which normally goes toward general education and course materials, not job training.

“There might be fewer [regular] course sections, fewer computers for classrooms and other materials” with Proposition 98 funds reduced, said Scott Lay, an analyst with the Community College League of California, a nonprofit group representing the state’s two-year institutions.

The drive to move those on welfare quickly into jobs also raises other concerns, chiefly over whether the jobs might be low-paying, short-term work that ultimately will lead people back to welfare if they can’t make ends meet. Those who complete their community college education garner much higher wages, studies have shown.

A recent one by the California Community Colleges tracked former students. It showed that those on welfare who were taking classes and working part-time jobs and who completed a certificate program earned 194% more after three years than what they made their final year in college, and those with an associate’s degree earned 248% more--far bigger differences than for the overall student population.

What’s more, of the 139,000 students on welfare, only 20,000 were in welfare-to-work programs such as GAIN, which provides basic skills classes and other courses before placing people in jobs.

That means the vast majority entered college on their own volition trying to get a leg up, said Connie Anderson, an analyst with the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office.

“We want to make sure those students who came in under their own initiative, and who are working toward a degree that will lead to employment, are not pulled out of school and told to get into a job,” Anderson said.

The community colleges are pushing for state legislation that would exempt community college students who are working part-time and getting good grades from the time restrictions for welfare. Officials also want various work-study programs counted as employment.

Still, government officials said they cannot yet answer the myriad questions on the fate of the students.

Bob Griffith, acting director of children and family services at the Orange County Social Services Agency, said officials will be meeting with the community colleges in the coming weeks to assess the situation.

The most positive information he could offer now is that the welfare policy probably will not go into effect until January, giving students time to complete their studies or switch into faster-track programs.

“There is pressure in many ways to push them out to get a job, any job,” said John S. Nixon, executive dean of instruction at Rancho Santiago.

He faces the daunting task of redesigning the curriculum so that students get the same education, only faster and more efficiently. He’s not sure how this will be done--”maybe the same number of hours but compacted”--but a systemwide task force meets next week to iron out these very issues.

Nixon wonders how a campus that draws from an impoverished, largely limited English-speaking area can do it without first instructing students in language and basic skills, lessons that can take more than a year.

Along with its associate’s and certificate programs, the college offers vocational and technical instruction in such high-demand fields as allied health and occupational therapy.

“The need for semiskilled work is almost nil. The big need is health, social service, and that requires training and education,” said David S. Guzman, dean of student support services.

For students such as Ruiz, the uncertainty eats at the nerves.

After a parade of low-wage service jobs, the mother of four attended a career fair at Rancho Santiago that “opened my eyes that I could be something more than a McDonald’s worker.”

She earned her general education diploma at the college’s adult school and then transferred into an associate’s program, aiming to study psychology and ultimately enter the human development or social services field.

Now in her second year, she needs at least two more years before she can transfer to a four-year college, because she must juggle child care and part-time work as a game-room monitor on campus.

Losing her welfare benefits before she finishes her studies would mean taking a job that would leave little if any time for the schooling she believes will give her an advantage in the job market.

“All they want to do is put us in warehouse jobs,” she said.