Engaging with Welfare Reform
Yesterday's (8/20/06) StarTribune had an editorial entitled "Welfare reform's unfinished agenda". The editorial summarizes the history of welfare reform, pointing out that the number of people on welfare has fallen in the ten years since the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was enacted, but that the poverty rate has increased since 2000. The next phase of TANF, according to the Strib, "... simply pretends that people aren't working enough. It requires adults on cash aid to work longer hours and requires states to push recipients into the workforce faster."
The editorial goes on to assert that this is "the wrong strategy for a population of poor, single mothers who are trying to raise small children while finishing vocational degrees, visiting doctors or battling off violent husbands." It quotes Nancy Cauthen, deputy director of Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, as saying "Simply putting more pressure on a poor, troubled mom doesn't help the states, it doesn't help the families and it doesn't help the children.
It's easy -- and perhaps not wildly off the mark -- to blame cold-hearted legislators for this situation. However, the welfare problem is an extraordinarily difficult one. The interlocking variables of low wages, insufficient affordable housing, poor public transportation and education, limited child care, family dysfunction, and deficient mental health services and health insurance mean that any single solution is likely to be inadequate.
A systems approach is needed to find optimal solutions, and this is just the sort of complex problem to which the objectivity and multidisciplinary capabilities of universities could be well-suited. Imagine an institute that brings together economists, family social scientists, mathematicians and statisticians and computer modelers, psychologists, educators, ethicists, public health and transportation experts, sociologists, lawyers, political scientists, and demographers to research these issues. Imagine the opportunities to partner with government and NGOs, as well as with community members who are experts in the most direct sense. Imagine the teaching opportunities that would arise.
One can also imagine the political pressures on any university that undertook such an ambitious effort, and the dissatisfactions of the discipline-bound faculty and students who might fret about a lack of focus and rigor. Such ambitious engaged scholarship is not to be undertaken lightly, but could pay great rewards both to society and to the university's sense of itself.