Welfare recipients’ abilities to attend college while receiving aid has been severely curtailed by the TANF program, due in part to concerns about long-term education in a time-limited program. Yet, prior research indicates that college enrollment, and particularly graduation, are strong indicators of positive future outcomes. Findings from the NLSY indicate that during the pre-TANF period, 17 percent of welfare spells had some overlap with college enrollment. Among women who enroll, however, just 36 percent graduate at any point in the 20-year NLSY panel and receipt of financial aid loans is a strong predictor of graduation. Attending college while on aid is associated with up to an additional one and a half years of aid receipt. Graduation may help to ameliorate this, although women who are already enrolled in college when they begin to receive welfare are more likely to graduate than those who start college as welfare recipients.

Today's welfare system does not encourage postsecondary education, focusing instead on services aimed at immediate employment. The loss of postsecondary education as a route out of poverty for welfare recipients may be detrimental to some women. College graduation is associated with lower rates of return to aid and post-welfare poverty than attendance without graduation or no attendance. However, graduation rates for welfare recipients are well below national graduation rates.

Since the founding of UC Santa Cruz in 1965, first-year undergraduate students have enrolled in a class called Core: a seminar offered by their college that introduces students to the theme of the college and, in recent decades, college-level writing. Beginning in Fall 2018, Core was reformed into a new course called College 1. Unlike Core, College 1 focuses on academic reading rather than writing and includes a common set of learning outcomes designed around the “ACMES:” analysis, critical thinking, metacognition, engagement across difference, and self-efficacy. This dissertation examines the implementation of College 1 from the perspectives of the instructors who first taught it in Fall 2018. Drawing from interviews, classroom observations, and an original survey, I examine how instructors understood the College 1 learning outcomes and taught these in their classrooms. This study sheds light on the process of implementing curricular change in higher education and, more broadly, on how individuals’ sensemaking shapes change in institutions. Three main findings emerged from this study: College 1 instructors tended to adopt explicit, implicit, or oppositional approaches to teaching the course learning outcomes; instructors’ classroom practices were related to their sense of autonomy over their classes; and a central challenge articulated by instructors was the integration of Chinese international students into their untracked classes. From these findings, I offer practical recommendations for future professional development trainings for College 1 instructors.

An executive summary aimed at California policymakers describing CalWORKs families as they approach the time limit. Analysis of findings from a telephone survey conducted between June 2004 and August 2005 of 1,797 recipients in six focus counties who were within six months of reaching the sixty-month time limit according to county administrative records. The survey explores the demographic characteristics of the recipients as well as family employment and employment history, barriers to employment, material hardship, and knowledge of the time-limit policy and the amount of time on aid still available to them.

Yemaya’s Children (YC) is a Black community-based education organization that facilitates international travel for low-income youth in Baltimore. The two Black women co-founders of YC were inspired to found the organization in 2014 after encountering Black students from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean attending Escuela Latinoamericana de la Medicina (ELAM) outside of Havana, Cuba. In their words, the organization is grounded in “heal[ing] Black people.” For the co-founders, if Black youth are to survive and thrive in Baltimore, they need to heal. Drawing on qualitative data collected over four years in collaboration with YC, including participant observations during program events and international excursions, content analysis of program material, and interviews conducted with youth and adult leaders, I conceptualize YC’s curricular framework as emphasizing healing, unlearning, and extending. This curriculum re-orients focus on the future through imaginative exercises, demonstrating one of the ways that contemporary Black travel moves away from the past-oriented engagements that roots tourism allowed for and emphasizes collaborative future-building. Youth participants extend what they have learned beyond the organization such as by collaborating with city government to pass legislation that addresses the unique experiences of Baltimore youth. Yet working with organizations and institutions that are not focused on Black liberation can present unique challenges for youth. I find that they navigate these challenges by implementing lessons learned from the YC curriculum, especially those pertaining to healing. I conceptualize the ways in which one of YC’s central productions – a poster that Mayah and Ari commissioned to illustrate Carlota Lukumi – acts as a visual representation of the organization’s curricular framework. As a maternal archetype of fugitivity, Carlota emphasizes the role of fugitivity within the process of achieving Black liberation; circulates revolutionary ideals throught the diaspora; and attends to the maternal as a mode of feminist boundary-crossing to recognize the ways in which people and spaces contain the capacity for multiplicity. Carlota’s image signifies the YC curricular framework as constituted within Black feminist and decolonial praxes that generates fugitive imaginations for the future. Ultimately, this curricular framework, aided by the incorporation of international travel, presents ways for youth to understand themselves as capable of creating the future they need to thrive.

Detailed research findings from a telephone survey conducted between June 2004 and August 2005 of 1,797 recipients in six focus counties who were within six months of reaching the sixty-month time limit according to county administrative records. The survey explores the demographic characteristics of the recipients as well as family employment and employment history, barriers to employment, material hardship, and knowledge of the time-limit policy and the amount of time on aid still available to them.