Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, Deputy Director of MDRC’s Young Adults and Postsecondary Education policy area, has contributed a chapter, “Helping Low-Wage Workers Persist in Education Programs: Lessons from Research on Welfare Training Programs and Two Promising Community College Strategies,” to Strategies for Improving the Economic Mobility of Workers: Bridging Research and Practice, edited by Maude Toussaint-Comeau and Bruce D. Meyer and published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

The book comes out of a November 2007 conference cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The conference’s purpose was threefold: (1) to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss policies affecting low-wage workers and other vulnerable or disadvantaged populations; (2) to identify best practices in workforce development initiatives; and (3) to extract lessons for devising effective policies.

The chapters in the volume seek to offer a fresh review of the economic circumstances of disadvantaged populations, as well as to provide a provocative but nuanced assessment of the effectiveness of various policies and practices geared to redress a number of issues affecting them. Examples of programs discussed include housing allowances that address the spatial mismatch between poor inner-city neighborhoods and areas with job growth, employment and training programs for former welfare recipients, and labor market reentry programs for the hard-to-employ/ex-offenders in distressed communities.

Richburg-Hayes’ chapter reviews what is known about education acquisition by low-wage workers and highlights promising strategies being tested at several community colleges, including enhanced student services and performance-based scholarships. An earlier version of her chapter is available as a working paper on the MDRC Web site.