Last semester, Aja Riley was busy caring for her 4-year old and two of her sister’s children, all while balancing her work at the Center for Social Development with her studies at the Brown School of Social Work.

“Even if I weren’t a parent, I would still get a higher education.” Riley, 28, said, “You need an education to make money.”

Shanta Pandey, associate professor of social work, was dismayed that mothers like Riley had to struggle with balancing their studies and even consider dropping out of higher education to make ends meet. Her recently published study, “Bachelor’s degree for women with children: a promising pathway to poverty reduction,” examines how both single and married mothers benefit financially from pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

According to the human capital theory, people with more education have more work experience and thus are more productive and have higher salaries.

Education is the major diffrence between poverty and affluence. In 2001, single mothers over 25 without a high school diploma were a little over 56 percent more likely to be below the poverty line. In the same year, only 10 percent of single mothers with a bachelor’s degree or higher were below the poverty line.

Married mothers over 25 showed a similar trend. In 2005, those without a high school diploma were below the poverty line at 21 percent, but mothers with a bachelor’s degree or higher only constituted 1.4 percent below the poverty line.

Pandey said that the Clinton’s welfare reform law in 1996 galvanized her to investigate how women on welfare would be affected. Currently, welfare pay is limited to five years. Unless the state offers funds on top of the federal welfare money, welfare recipients are restricted to about one year of secondary education.

But financial burdens as well as overwhelming responsibility has caused single parents to drop out at a rate of over 50 percent. Of 16 million undergraduates nationwide, 2.2 million of them are singles parents, according to a 2002 census conducted by the National Center of Education Statistics. Of these single parents, 70 percent of them are women.

Tiffany Powell, 36, had to drop out of Washington University last spring when the cost of living in St. Louis exceeded her income. She is currently finishing her master’s in social work at the University of Texas at Arlington. A single parent with a 10-year-old daughter, Powell said that while she enjoyed Wash. U., the transition from her native Texas proved difficult.

“Sometimes I had to bring my daughter with me to class,” Powell said. “I had to adjust my schedule and leave work, get my daughter and come back to work [study].”

Powell helped Pandey think of ways to improve services for single parents at Washington University, which she called a “traditional school,” for students without children.

In Pandey’s study, which she coauthored with two other social workers, in “Equal Opportunities International,” Pandey suggests that financial incentives should be offered for low-income students pursuing secondary education. Full-day childcare facilities, subsidized public transportation, and a mentorship program would also help married or single women.

“The ideal situation would be to go to school, get a job, get married and have children. That sequence may not be possible for all women,” Pandey said. “Welfare is no longer there. If they go out and find jobs, the jobs they find without a good education are jobs without healthcare benefits, and are often at odd hours because they have a childcare responsibility.

“The goal is to improve their human capital, in this case education, so they can find stable jobs.”

Riley agreed. “If you are a parent, and you are in a situation where you’re not only thinking of yourself, but also someone else, it’s better to go to school. A single person can’t make it on $5.15 an hour. A person with a child definitely can’t make it on $5.15 an hour.”

In the 2004 study, “Postsecondary Education and Economic Well-Being of Single Mothers and Single Fathers,” Pandey found that single mothers with four years or more of education earned on average $12,257 more per year than women with a high school education. Single fathers earned $16,624 more on average.

“Reinstituting these benefits are worth it,” Pandey said. “Education is expensive, but these people will be out of poverty for the rest of their lives.”

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