Since 1971, federal welfare legislation has required that an increasing share of welfare recipients participate in some form of work-directed activities as a condition of receiving full (or, more recently, any) welfare benefits. Even without any special welfare-to-work program, however, many low-income people enroll in school, training, community college, or some other program to help them gain skills and find work. This voluntary activity may have a big payoff, but it is not due to welfare reform and cannot reliably be captured in studies of reform programs.
Thus, asking about the value of education and training as part of welfare reform has a special meaning: does requiring education or training for people who may or may not want to participate have the intended positive results relative to what people would have achieved on their own or to other approaches such as job search? This question is particularly relevant to mandatory basic education, since few welfare recipients (only 8 percent in some studies) state that they want to go back to school to study reading and math; they have had poor experiences in school in the past and prefer to get specific skills training (around 60 percent) or help looking for a job (about 30 percent).