Selected Summary Findings in Brief

Results from 20 programs in 9 states (California's GAIN, NEWWS, San Diego SWIN, Florida's Project Independence, Minnesota's MFIP, Florida's FTP, Connecticut's Jobs First, and Vermont's Welfare Restructuring Project) using random assignment methods. (From How Welfare and Work Policies Affect Employment and Income: A Synthesis of Research, MDRC May 2001):

Impact of work requirements on earnings

• Programs of all types (job search first, education first, mixed initial activities) were effective to some extent. Each of the job-search-first programs increased earnings by at least $400 per year. Most of the education-first programs also increased earnings but by a smaller amount.
• Most of the increases in earnings were the result of increases in employment (in the most effective programs, employment in the program group was more than 10 percentage points higher than in the corresponding control group); on average, the jobs obtained by program group members provided about the same number of hours of work and paid about the same wage as the jobs obtained by control group members.
• A variety of approaches can increase employment and earnings, but the programs that produced the largest effects used a mix of job search and education as initial activities while maintaining a strong focus on employment.
• Side-by-side comparisons of job-search-first and education-first programs indicate that the two approaches led to similar increases in employment and earnings after three years, but the job-search-first programs were less expensive to operate.
• Dividing all 11 programs into two broad categories - employment-focused programs and education-focused programs - programs in the former category generally had larger effects on employment, earnings, and welfare receipt than those in the latter category. Given the large number of programs examined and their variety of served populations, implementation features, and labor markets, these results provide more support for the advantages of employment-focused programs than for education-focused ones.
• The results for those without a high school diploma or GED follow much the same pattern as high school graduates. The main education activity in which nongraduates in these programs participated was adult basic education rather than vocational training or postsecondary education. There is evidence from a few studies that vocational training may help welfare recipients obtain better jobs, but many training programs accept only high school graduates and people with basic reading and math skills, making them inaccessible to nongraduates. As for college education, there is little direct evidence as to whether it affects welfare recipients' earnings.

Impact of work requirements on welfare receipt

• The programs with the largest effects on earnings generally had the largest effects on welfare benefits.
• Reductions also tended to be larger in states with more generous welfare benefits.
• A number of the programs reduced welfare benefits more than they increased earnings. These programs may have imposed many sanctions (grant reductions) on recipients who failed to attend as-signed activities, encouraged some people to leave welfare even though they had not found employment, or discovered previously unreported jobs as a result of the participation mandates.

Cost-Benefit Findings

• For government: The education-first programs cost more to operate than the programs with job search first or mixed initial activities because participation in education and training activities tends to extend over a longer period than participation in job search activities. The operational cost of the Portland program, which used a mix of initial activities, was higher than the operational costs of two of the three job-search-first programs but substantially lower than those of the education-first programs.
• For participants: Most of the programs had fairly modest effects on income.19 In other words, the programs changed the composition of participants' income by reducing their reliance on public assistance, but they did not make participants financially much better off than they would have been in the absence of the programs.

Child Outcomes

• These studies that included child outcomes 2 years after random assignment found few impacts on children's academic achievement or behavior, and the impacts were both favorable and unfavorable. This picture may look different later in children's lives, but the studies examined here can never fully answer the question of whether working role models affect children in the long term because none of them measured outcomes more than five years after random assignment. Five-year findings from the NEWWS evaluation indicated that there were small and varied impacts on a limited number of measures of child well-being among children who were preschool age at random assignment. These impacts varied by site more often than by welfare-to-work approach. Perhaps most surprisingly, the impacts on adolescents (when found in two of the four sites for which data are available) were predominantly unfavorable. In general, it is possible that adolescents' academic functioning may have been especially vulnerable to the increased employment, decreased income, and/or changes in household composition that occurred among their mothers in several of the programs.