Accessible, affordable, high-quality child care and early education are vital for the economic well-being of families, communities, and the nation. However, families, especially those of color with low incomes, face significant challenges in accessing these services due to systemic racial and economic barriers. Federal programs like the Child Care…

This article focuses on higher education access for undocumented immigrants in the United States. Since individual states develop and govern their own policies, the political landscape around college access is always in a state of flux. This is confusing to school counselors, families, and students. We use cartography to make sense of this…

Sex and sexuality curricula in the USA should acknowledge the structural conditions racialised young people navigate to make sense of their sexual experiences and more explicitly recognise the political power of gender and sexuality. This paper suggests educators use women of colour feminism and decolonial studies to offer a historicised approach…

This study explored marginalized stakeholder feedback by reconstructing the lived experiences of 13 single mothers who completed post-secondary education while dependent on public assistance since the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). This study utilized a qualitative, hermeneutic…

There are over 32 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and of this population, over 1.5 million are children (Palmer & Davidson, 2011). These children grow up in the US, achieve primary and secondary education, and when they are ready to pursue postsecondary education, it becomes harder for them to achieve. In this paper,…

In its 2019 report, "Beyond the Border: Family Separation in the Trump Era," UnidosUS demonstrates how the current trajectory of the nation's immigration policies is threatening the future of an entire generation of American children. This issue brief on Illinois is part of a series that builds on this analysis by exploring the stakes at…

Although current and former English Learner (EL) or "ever-EL" students comprise one of the fastest-growing K-12 populations, we still know relatively little about the factors that influence their college-going. Using Perna's seminal college-going model as a launching point, we propose a policy-driven empirical approach to explore how…

This article presents a critical review of the recent literature on undocumented students in higher education, placing it in the context of recent anti-immigrant sentiment and policy revisions. The 81 reviewed studies reveal that undocumented students confront significant financial barriers, shoulder unique psychological and social burdens tied to…

Despite the claimed success of the 1996 Welfare Reform, little research using multivariate regression has examined changes in multiple public safety-net programs. Thus, we still do not know whether public safety-net programs for the poor have shrunk or increased nationwide, along with the sharp declines in cash assistance. Using state-level data…

Despite educational gains in recent decades for many Latino students, there are still significant barriers to universal quality education in the U.S.; among these are the stresses of current U.S. immigration policy and political discourse, which serve as negative multipliers to pre-existing social, economic, and health inequities. This report…

Food assistance programs--including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), the National School Lunch Program, and the School Breakfast Program--have been remarkably successful at their core mission: reducing food insecurity among low-income children. Moreover, writes Craig Gundersen, SNAP in particular has also been…

Several factors contribute to a disproportionately lower Latino participation in college education. Foremost among those factors are policies that encourage quick job placement over career development, lack of understanding of the benefits of a college degree, lower expectations for Latino students, poor financial planning, and lack of guidance. A…

This article offers a review of welfare reform evaluation studies, summarizing research that has generated a consensus among mainstream policy analysts that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) has had few effects beyond caseload reductions and increases in employment. Given that supporters and…

The budget for the U.S. Department of Labor for Fiscal Year 2010 includes a total of $45 million to support and study transitional jobs. This paper describes the origins of the transitional jobs models that are operating today, reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and other subsidized employment models, and offers some…

Research Findings: This study investigated parents' experiences using Child Care and Development Fund and other state-dispersed child care subsidies, reasons for choosing their current child care program, and perceptions of the quality of child care received from their current program. A telephone survey of 659 parents receiving child care…