NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF STATE WELFARE POLICY ON RECIPIENT COLLEGE ENROLLMENT Kenya L. Covington and William E. Spriggs INTRODUCTION The passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) has created a national policy environment that provides a robust opportunity to explore policy impacts within a natural exper- iment context. By design, welfare has been examined relying primarily on experimental approaches dating back to the '80s. Despite the wide acceptance of this approach to study impacts of welfare policies, some have acknowledged important limitations and enormous costs of experiments (Julnes and Foster 2002). Julnes and Foster (2002) assert that combining methods both experi- mental and quasi-experimental designs will bring about the best combination of valid findings. Furthermore, the increased availability and standardization of administrative data has made it both cost effective and efficient to analyze these data using quasi-experimental design (Culhane and Metraux 1997). In 1997, the implementation of PRWORA marked a long developing new social policy environment primarily focused on work. The key belief evident within this environment suggests that "the best way to promote employment is to focus on immediate job placement, regardless of job quality; and that the best way for individuals to advance in the labor force is to build a work his- tory or participate in education and training activities while working (Strawn, Breenberg and Savner 2001). Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the type of edu- cation and training that can count toward work is restricted. The federal gov- ernment limits education and training to one year. The devolution features of TANF allow states to be more restrictive then the federal law if they see fit. Many states chose to explicitly limit the number of hours that college enroll- ment could count as a legitimate work activity and the duration or totally excluded postsecondary education. Because of the discretion allowed by case- workers without any checks for practices that discriminate, minority welfare