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Browsing by Author "Duke-Benfield, Amy E."

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    Benefits Access for College Completion: Lessons Learned from a Community College Initiative to Help Low Income Students
    Duke-Benfield, Amy E.; Saunders, Ellen Katherine (Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), 2017-04-01)
    The Benefits Access for College Completion (BACC) initiative was a multi-year initiative designed to provide community college students with access to a full range of public benefits in order to reduce financial barriers to college completion. These benefits include, but are not limited to, those in the box below. This project largely broke new ground. Although a handful of colleges across the country are helping students access public benefits, whether through Single Stop USA, the Benefit Bank, or Seedco’s Earn Benefits, very few colleges approached embedding benefits access into college processes as systemically as this project set out for the colleges participating in BACC. The goal of the initiative was to develop sustainable operational and funding strategies for integrating services into existing community college operations to help eligible low-income students more easily access public benefits. The efforts of institutions ranged from providing students with accurate information about benefits to screening them for program eligibility, assisting them with enrollment by filling out applications and gathering documentation, and focusing on changing policies to better serve students who are eligible but not enrolled.
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    Developing State Policy that Supports Low-income, Working Students
    Duke-Benfield, Amy E.; Garcia, Rosa M.; Walizer, Lauren; Welton, Carrie (CLASP, 2018-09-01)
    Students and state policymakers clearly understand how important postsecondary education is to financial wellbeing and state economic productivity. Those with associate or bachelor’s degrees earn 31 percent and 77 percent more, respectively, than people with a high school diploma. And college graduates are less likely to be unemployed. This report lays out an action framework that the higher education leaders, nonprofit advocates, state policymakers, and postsecondary students we gathered during an April 2018 roundtable agree are needed to support the educational success of low-income working students, particularly students of color. It also examines how states must expand their policies beyond the traditional postsecondary landscape to acknowledge the complexity of these students’ lives.