In many states, education and training programs have welcomed the transformation of welfare agencies from places which merely certify individuals eligible for benefits, to ones that try to move welfare recipients into independence. However, in several ways, welfare reforms have undermined the efforts to improve workforce development systems. They have undermined the rhetoric about high skills and high wages, since they usually provide very short and low-level training. They have distracted local and state policymakers, and, in some places, changes meant for welfare recipients have driven changes for the nonwelfare population as well. While it is too soon to know what the ultimate effects of welfare reform will be, its spillover into other dimensions of workforce development have been largely negative.
States mean different things when they reform their workforce development systems.
In the variety of state efforts, we can discern a rough hierarchy of efforts to link programs. These range from information-sharing among programs, to referrals of individual clients or students, to joint service delivery where programs collaborate in providing employment services. A different dimension of system-building is the improvement of the quality of individual programs. In general, however, dimensions of quality have not been especially prominent in state reforms, and most local and state officials could not provide well-considered conceptions of quality or name exemplary programs. This remains a central issue to address in the future.