Alec R. Levenson, Elaine Reardon, and Stefanie R. Schmidt

Welfare recipients, mostly women, do not have the basic skills needed to find well-paying jobs, argue Alec R. Levenson, Elaine Reardon, and Stefanie R. Schmidt in the following viewpoint. Women on welfare have lower literacy levels and fewer years of schooling than nonrecipients, the authors assert. They maintain that these low basic skills put most jobs, including service-sector employment, out of the reach of women trying to get off welfare and out of poverty. Skills training and job training programs are unlikely to enable these women to raise their earnings above the poverty line, the authors contend. Levenson, Reardon, and Schmidt are economists at the Milken Institute, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California.

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