NYS Welfare Recipients Win A Battle In The Fight For Equal Access to Education

A group of about 20 people met in the backroom of the Black Bear Lounge in late June to listen to Maureen Lane from Welfare Right Initiative speak about her efforts to promote “Access to Education for all”. Over the course of an hour we were given the short history of a movement predicated on the principle that making higher education opportunities available to those who need it most is our best weapon for reducing welfare dependency and providing the life changing catalysis that can turn lives around.

The Welfare Rights Initiative is a 15 year old organization dedicated to addressing the systemic issues behind welfare reform by providing education, legal, social service and advocacy program training. These tools empower young men and women to organize for fair and equal access to among other things, the right to a higher education.

Part of what allowed this program to flourish was their successful push in 2000 to get college enrollment and work-study recognized as sufficient for fulfilling  the welfare work requirement . However to get this passed advocates had to jump enormous hurdles. The passage of the Work Study and Internship Bill in 2000 essentially rested on the leadership of State Senators Tom Duane (D) and Ray Meier (R) ability to foster bi-partisan cooperation between the parties and correct an injustice in the CUNY system that had already “lost over 20,000 students receiving public assistance because of misguided federal, state and city welfare policy”

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Is Higher Ed a H.M.O’s Biggest Fan ?

On the Times Economix blog, Uwe E. Reinhardt suggests that higher education and heath care might have similarities that inform the health care debate. Reinhardt was on a panel of policy experts during the 1980’s that made recommendations on how Congress should pay physicians who handled Medicare patients. He notes that doctors felt that the H.M.O model did not compensate physicians appropriately for their services.

He then moves on to dissect the doctors’ argument by looking at other goods the public deems vital, specifically education, and asks how those goods would look if they were provided in the same way as heath care.

He writes:

Correctly viewed, a modern university is a prepaid, staff-model, pedagogic group practice – the educational analogue of a staff-model health maintenance organization, or H.M.O., like the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan.

Like H.M.O.’s, which are prepaid an annual capitation for all of an insured person’s medically needed services, universities are prepaid one annual tuition fee for all the pedagogic services going into the education of the student.

But suppose universities operated instead on a piece-rate compensation basis, like the current health system. They would then be merely a pastiche of different pedagogic profit centers, each with its own fee schedules and ownership patterns.

What he describes is not a particular reassuring backdrop to figuring out how to pay for college and although his post does not solve the health care debate, I think that when we apply the same reasoning to higher education that is currently applied to heath care we see how unreasonable it is to argue that we should not reform the way doctors and hospitals currently do business.