Although most poor, single mothers today are employed, many of them are working in low-wage jobs, often in positions without benefits. Earning a college degree is typically the best route to a high-paying career but many of these women find it hard to squeeze classes into a schedule already packed with work and childcare. One study of 158 single-mother college students in New York found that 100 percent of the former welfare recipients who earned four-year degrees stopped relying on public-benefit programs, compared to 81 percent of those who got two-year degrees. If earning a degree is so effective in ending poor mothers’ reliance on welfare, why aren’t policymakers making it easier for low-income single moms to go college? The answer is complicated.

For single parents who rely on public assistance, college classes do not count as “work” in most states, so many of those who return to school lose access to benefits like childcare vouchers and cash assistance. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which limited recipients’ access to cash assistance, also restricted the definition of “work” to nine core categories. Work credit is largely limited to vocation-focused educational training, and only for a maximum of one year. Each state has its own specific regulations.

For Trainor, attending classes counted toward some of her work benefits. So, every two weeks, she would wait until the classroom emptied to ask me to sign her work-verification forms and confirm she’d been in school. To retain eligibility for cash assistance, the state of Connecticut requires that recipients meet two times a week with their caseworkers to provide documented proof of any hours they work, attend school, or search for a job.

Even complying with all of the complicated regulations doesn’t guarantee recipients receive benefits when they need them, as Jessica McLeod, a single mother in Boston, discovered. I first interviewed McLeod for my dissertation a few years back. She’d lived in a shelter before she enrolled in community college. After earning a 3.7 GPA in community college, she was accepted into the nursing program at Bay State College, a for-profit institution that primarily offers two-year degrees. As a full-time student at Bay State, McLeod relied on food stamps, cash assistance, and a childcare voucher for her 8-year-old daughter Alia.

“I went through three different caseworkers who were so nasty about my being a full-time student,” said McLeod, who’s now 38 and working full-time as a registered nurse. As with Trainor, the caseworkers had to verify McLeod’s work-participation paperwork to ensure she was fulfilling all of the benefit program’s requirements. And even though education programs like the one in which McLeod was enrolled can count toward those requirements, it seems that caseworkers often favor vocational training as opposed to college classes. “Unless you’re doing their training to become a home health aide … [the caseworkers] just want you working,” McLeod said. “Don’t they understand I’m going to college so that I don’t have to use these benefits anymore?”