PRACTICE AND POLICY LECTURE SERIES MAR 2011 – THE ECONOMICS OF OKLAHOMA SINGLE PARENTS.

Larkin Warner: The topic is the Economics of Oklahoma Single Parents.  This is an extremely broad topic.  Today I am limiting my remarks to observations derived from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey or the ACS.  The ACS may be accessed, as again some of you know, over the Internet as part of the Bureau's American Fact Finder program. Beginning in 2010, the Census of Population and Housing, the Census Bureau no longer includes the long form questionnaire applied to a sample of households and covering detailed social and economic information of the type included in this brief paper.  Instead, the Bureau has initiated the ACS program, seeking the same detailed information annually from a nationwide sample of around 3 million households, and the data used here is based on the ACS data set for 2005 through 2009.  

Just several quick definitions, this kind of stuff drives me nuts, but anyway a housing unit is guess what, it is a house …

(audience laughter)

Larkin Warner (continues): …an apartment, a mobile home, a group of rooms, or a single room that is occupied as separate living quarters.  A household, this includes all people who occupy a housing unit.  A householder is the person in whose name the housing unit is registered.  There are no householders under 15.  A family household involves a householder and one or more individuals related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption.  And the family household is the main topic of the rest of my remarks.  

I guess I don't need to give a definition of poverty to this crew, but just a reminder, examples of a family meeting the poverty threshold, or the poverty guideline rather, for 2010: a one-person family $10,830, a two-person family $14,570, three person is $18,310, four persons is $22,050.  Now, some of the ASC data apply only to households with no specification whether or not there are children under 18 present.  For the most part, variables applying, I would argue, variables applying to the entire population of households present a strong indication of what that variable would look like when it was applied to families with children under 18.  

In ‘05 - ‘09, children under 18 are present in 62% of the male-headed families and 72% of the female-headed families.  Now, the data are often applied herein to men and women separately, and to some extent what we will see is there is a special need to pay attention to the data applying to women.  

Let’s look at family status and the economic penalty for not being married.  The ASC reports marital origins, regardless of the presence or absence of children.  A person can achieve the “Single Status” by not getting married in the first place, by being married and separated, by being divorced, or by becoming widowed.  Excluding the widowed, I think the most striking contrasts here involve the observation that about 30% of the men and 25% of the women were never married.  At the other end of the spectrum, 12% of the men and 15% of the women were divorced.  Those are pretty big differences when you think, you know, the number of men and women except for the older ages ought to be about the same.  

One of the most direct routes for women to achieve single-parent status is to have a child out of wedlock.  On average, during ‘05 - ‘09, one-third of the 54,000 Oklahoma women giving birth were not married, again according to the American Community Survey average for that ‘05 - ‘09 period.  Family income is one of the indications of the economic costs of being single rather than being married.  Here the contrasts are striking, and the economic penalty for single families is substantial.

During ‘05 - ‘09, three-quarters of Oklahoma's 940,000 families were married couples and had a median household income of $61,000, no $62,000.  Eighteen percent of families consisted of women with no husband present and a median income of $24,000 while 7% of families headed by a man with no wife present had a median income of $36,000.  So, the men are in somewhat better shape than the single women, but there is certainly a significant economic penalty applying to the single men as well as to the single women.  

The earnings from work, and work itself, are important determinates of family income, and here are three quick reminders:  More education means more income.  During ‘05 - ‘09, median annual earnings were $51,000 and $34,000 respectively for men and women with Bachelor’s Degrees and only $22,000 and, get this – $13,000 respectively for men and women without a high-school diploma.  Amazing differences.  No matter what the level of education, men tend to earn more than women.  This, of course, may involve discrimination, but it's also associated with the fact that at any point in time women, even with the same educational level, tend to have less work experience than men and tend to work fewer hours per week and fewer weeks per year than men.  By definition, one must be employed to have earnings.  In ‘05 - ‘09, the percent of the population 16 and over that was employed averaged 64% for men and 53% for women.  

Let’s focus on single-parent kids, how many and where.  Of the estimated 875,000 related children under 18 in family households in Oklahoma during ‘05 - ‘09, two-thirds lived in married couple families.  One-quarter lived in households headed by a single female, and 7% were in male-headed households.  While the 63,000 children with single-male-headed households are worthy of note certainly, in many ways the economics of Oklahoma single parents is very much a woman's subject with 218,000 kids living in single-female-headed households.

What is the distribution of these single-parent kids between the state's metro and non- metro areas?  Relatively, a small share of kids are found in Lawton, in the Lawton MSA, while 33% are in the Oklahoma City MSA, and 25% are in Tulsa.  Single-parent families are certainly not a big-city phenomenon with 38% of the kids in non-metro areas, non-metropolitan areas.  A rough but reasonable estimate is that there tends to be a little less than two children per single-parent household.

What about the single-parent families?  Let’s focus on the number of families, how many and how poor, and I have handed out some tables there.  The third table in the little packet that I handed out to you is an actual copy from the Census Bureau's website, a remarkable table.  Table B, 17010, poverty status in the past 12 months of families by family type, by presence of related children under 18, of age of related children, and the universe here is for families.  I have included three columns in the piece that I copied from the Census Bureau Report.  One is for the State of Oklahoma, and then I threw a couple of very rural counties in just to illustrate that
you can pull up all kinds of data from this. I mean only an economist I guess like me and Eric Long from the Oklahoma City Chamber …

(Larkin and audience laughs) 

Larkin (continues): …would go nuts over this kind of stuff, but the point is that we can talk about these issues locally, using this ASC data.  And, for the areas that are big enough, you got racial breakdown and Hispanic/non-Hispanic.  And, then in this table, data are applied to families within and without poverty, the poverty classification applied to married-couple families and single-parent families, headed by men and women, and I have simplified that Census Bureau table in the very first table, Table 1.  Now, this is not the place to undertake a recondite discussion of the methodologies of the federal government in estimating the incidences of poverty.  I suspect you guys are sick of that. I mean, you've got to be careful.  You've got to talk about the poverty threshold and then that's not quite right.  I mean you've got to be careful because you might want to be talking about poverty guidelines, and the guidelines are different than the thresholds. Eek!  

Anyway, in any case, the poverty guide, this is terrible poverty.  This is extremely poor, and as you guys know all too well, they are so bad that you've got to ramp them way up.  So, your food stamps is what, 185% of the poverty level?  And, so, and reduced- priced school lunch is around 180%, something like that.  

The second, the ACS data are based on a sample of respondents and applied to the particular point in time in which forms were filled out.  There is a good deal of turnover in the population class as in poverty, with people and families entering and exiting the classification at varying lengths of times.  There was just within the last couple of weeks a major study undertaken by the Census Bureau which works over this problem. So, if you look at this turnover, an optimistic interpretation of this feature is that a significant amount of poverty is episodic in nature.  We know that.  A less sanguine interpretation that I tend to take, because I look at the bad side of things is that at any point in time, the share of population classed as “In Poverty” fails to recognize the share of population just emerging from or about to enter the poverty classification.  

Third, poverty is arguably a special challenge in Oklahoma.  According to the ASC data for 2009, the share of the state’s population living in poverty was 16.2% compared to a national average of 14.3%.  Thirty-four states have lower poverty rates than Oklahoma.  Our per-cap income looks a lot better relative to the national average than this data.  The data in Table 1 emphasizes the significance of the single-parent poverty problem, as applying primarily to women.  For married couples, only 9% of the households with children under 18 were classified as poor.  In other words, the likelihood of a child being poor who is living in a married-couple family is about one in ten.  For children with a male single parent, the odds of being poor are a little in excess of one out of five, that is 22% of such households are poor.

However, the odds of the child being poor rise dramatically for families with single mothers.  About 45% of female-headed households fell into the poverty classification.  If we look at the number of children instead of the number of families as we do in Table 2, we reach the same conclusion.  There is a great deal of economic stress in single-parent families, especially in female-headed families.
Statewide in ‘05 - ‘09 there were nearly 2000 kids under 18 living in families classified as below the poverty level.  Half of those kids, 111,000, are in single-parent families headed by a woman.  So, and these are poor families.  For male-headed families, a quarter of the kids were poor.  

Now it is natural to look at these statistics and wish that they were different.  Wouldn't it be much better if children were not born out of wedlock and marriages were stable and long lasting, the American male would take responsibility for his progeny, stay-at-home mothers would manage the day-to-day challenges of child rearing.  Nobody can seriously challenge the need for policies, both religious and otherwise, to avoid single-parent situations in the first place.  However, we also have to deal with the world as it is, rather than what we would like it to be.  Here, the economic realities cannot avoid the basic proposition that in a market economy such as ours, people are poor because the labor they have to sell does not reflect substantial investment in education.  Realistically, this investment in human capital begins with childcare facilities and extends through post-secondary education.  

I am going to turn now with my wife Jean to the challenge for higher education as it relates specifically to women.  Thank you.  

(applause) 

Jean S. Warner: Thank you, Larkin.  If you haven’t figured out by now, I roped him into this.  

(audience laughs)

Jean S. Warner: He’s such a numbers guy and I am not.  I still laugh  about it when I first met him, he would  get like the U.S. Statistical Abstract out  and show me a page and go, “Look!” 

(audience laughs) 

Jean (continues): …and I would see hounds-tooth pattern.  Black, white, black, white.  And I would think, “Oh my God, I … I'm supposed to know what these numbers mean.” So, he has brought me along a little ways, but on this one I did go to him and say, “Honey, can you help me with the numbers side of this business?”  And you know, just to document the difference between us, he's got a handout with tables and numbers, and I've got a handout, which I hope you guys got, with just pictures.

(laughter).  

Jean (continues): I am the visual one.  Okay.  

Well, my focus is on Oklahoma's low-income single mothers and the connection to education.  So, Larkin's task was broader than just that, but for me the numbers that he shared with you that, you know, kind of keep me up at night are these:  For Oklahoma, one out of four families with children under the age of 18 is headed by a single mother. One out of four!  I mean, for me I was raised in a broken home and a single mom for a very short period of time, but most of the time I had two adult parents, and if I irritated one, I could go talk to the other, and you know if one was tired, I had the other one.  And it just seems sad to me that there are so many kids with just one parent, male or female.  

Nearly half, 45%, of those single-mother-headed households are living below the poverty line, and as Larkin said, “That’s really poor!”  That federal poverty line is really, really, really, really living in poverty.  If we come at it from a different perspective, and we just look at the families in Oklahoma living in poverty, three out of five families with children under the age of 18 living in poverty in Oklahoma are headed by a single mom.  So, to me that says, “single mom = poverty”
There is a pretty big connection there.  

And, one in four children in Oklahoma, nearly 218,000 kids, are living in female-headed households, and half of them are living in poverty.  So, I find that pretty alarming.  Let me add two more statistics that I am kind of working with that will segue into the relationship between single-mother households and education.  Well, 29% of women in Oklahoma who fail to graduate from high school live in poverty.  The rate at which women live in poverty decreases or declines to only 4.5% for women who have Bachelor's Degree or higher.  So, that is the good news.

Now, the bad new is that one in five Oklahoma women 25 and older has a Bachelor’s Degree or higher which puts us 6 percentage points below the national average.  So, if we could raise that figure up, we could begin to tackle the poverty problem.  So, for me, education is crucial.  

I am helping out a project called SMART, where SMART stands for “Single Mothers Academic Resource Team”.  This effort is headed by the Women's Foundation of Oklahoma and with some funding added in from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Ed, and I am going to embarrass her and point out Suzie Graves who is here.  Suzie would you raise your hand?  Suzie is with the Women's Foundation of Oklahoma and over this big project.  So, I am one member of a team working on a one-year planning grant for the Women's Foundation, and the team is composed of staff at the State Regents for Higher Ed, two faculty members who are associated with the Women’s and Gender Studies program at OU, and then members of the Oklahoma Women's Coalition.  

And, we also have an advisory team made up of a lot of economists and other policy experts who we feel that we can turn to when we get into areas that we’re not very knowledgeable about.  I am a generalist.  My PhD is in political science, so I am neither an expert on education policy nor do I know very much about any poverty programs.  

What the coalition brings to this project is volunteer citizens committed to improving the status of women in Oklahoma through education and advocacy.  We have working committees that look at aging education, health, incarceration, violence against women, and work/family balance, and then we have a seventh committee that looks at all of those issues as they impact girls, and this project is under the auspices of our education committee.  When the Women's Foundation initially invested in SMART a couple of years back, it was focused on encouraging low-income, single mothers to learn about going to college and get enrolled.  

Now the foundation has charged the SMART team with bringing to them in June of this year recommendations for programs that the foundation can fund that will increase the number of low-income, single mothers enrolled in and graduating from college.  We estimate that among those enrolled in colleges in Oklahoma at any given time, there are about 30,000 single-parent students. SMART has held several focus groups with single mothers across the State of Oklahoma, and you won't be surprised to learn that they deal with many barriers.  

Before they enroll for college, they have been told that they are not college material, or they worry that they’re not smart enough to go to college.  They have been out of school for a while, and they know that they are probably going to need remediation.  Often, the only role model that they have who knows anything about going to college is another single mother that they have encountered who is enrolled in college.

Many are first-generation college students.  They’ve never been on a college campus.  No one in their family knows how college works.  They’re unfamiliar with what I think of as the college culture, and they don't know terms like credit hours, Pell Grant, and bursar.  “Go over and see the bursar.”  “What does that mean?”  They are, generally from the focus groups, they were unaware of the fact that there was financial aid, and scholarships, and grants, and certainly didn’t know how to go find them.  

Once enrolled, they often don't have the emotional, let alone the financial support that most of us in this room had from our own family members while we were going to school.  It's hard for them to feel a part of the student body.  They just kind of don't connect very well because they drop the kids off, race to class, race to get the kids out of childcare and don't have an opportunity to stay around for student clubs and activities and the football game on Saturday, and all of those things that kind of bind the student body together.  

They struggle with reliable transportation, covering tuition and fees, the fact that they need to work in order to feed their children while they are going to school, the scheduling conflicts which are pretty severe between work and classes, since most of them are working minimum wage, and they show up at Walmart when they are told to or they lose their job.  

And the challenge of, the real challenge everywhere in America of finding affordable, available, quality childcare at or near a college campus.  Colleges don't tend to ask on their application forms when you apply to go to college if you are married or single and if you are raising children below the age of 18, but there is a form that does ask that, and it is officially referred to at the State Regents as FAFSA, FAFSA.  It took me a while to finally say, “Excuse me, could you tell
me what a FAFSA is?” 

FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and this is a form that can be completed online annually by prospective and current college students to determine eligibility for financial aid, and most kids do go in annually and fill it out.  If you are poor, that is your first barrier, because you've got to have a computer.  As part of the SMART grant, the State Regent staff just merged FASFA records with the state’s Unified Student Data System and then tracked students from 2004 to 2005 year forward for 6 years, and they captured data on students at all public
institutions in Oklahoma and eleven of our private institutions in Oklahoma.  And, here is
just a little of what they found:  

Thirty thousand single parents in Oklahoma apply for financial aid, yet half of them do not then go ahead and enroll in college.  Single-parent students are likely to have earned prior college credits, so they are not completely new to the college milieu.  It takes much longer for single-parent students to complete college, and less than 10% will earn a degree over a 6-year period.  More than one in five single-parent students selects a major in the medical and allied health fields, and frankly that is good, because we need more nurses and nurse’s aids.  

One in five Oklahoma single-parent students is attending either Tulsa Community College or Oklahoma City Community College with the remainder of those students that they track scattered all across Oklahoma.  So, like Larkin says, single-mother parents is not a metro/urban phenomenon.  They’re everywhere, and they try to find schools near them that they can go to.  

The SMART team is now searching for program models, and examples of best practice for programs that specifically target single mothers, primarily low-income single mothers, to help them overcome barriers of getting into but also more specifically, thriving while they are… once in college.  So, we are surveying assisting programs across the country that specifically target single moms.

And, as we do this, we’ve found a lot and looked at them, and kind of moved them around on the board and finally decided to categorize them into one of four categories.  So, the first category is recruitment programs.  These are really designed to hold fairs and festivals and events and go where single mothers are who are not in school, find them, tell them about going to school, how they can overcome the barriers, how to understand the system, and frankly, we don't find very many of these.  I think they are probably pretty low-key. Schools may do them, but we don't, they don't advertise them very well.  

And, so honestly, we kind of like our program.  We think it's pretty good, and one of the things that the SMART recruitment does is produce this magazine.  I brought copies of it for you to take home and take a look at.  It’s targeted at prospective single mothers who may want to go to college, but there’s also materials in there for people like you, frankly, policy makers and mentors.  

The second category is scholarships.  And, there are scholarships specifically targeted for single mothers, but boy they’re hard to find out about.  I think I am kind of a good guinea pig for this exercise because I don't know the higher-education system, and so, you know, I’m just sort of bumping around trying to find whatever I can find on the internet, talking to people, calling schools, that sort of thing.

And, if I have a hard time, imagine working three jobs, changing sheets in a motel, working for Walmart and waiting tables and raising kids and having time to find these programs.  So, there are some, but you have to be, you know, a woman of leisure, I think, to find them and then to qualify for them, because they may be the AAUW or Alpha Kappa Alpha or Avon and, you know, many of them you have to be affiliated with our club or you have to be, you know, living in a particular state.  So while there are some, they also have kind of narrow eligibility criteria.  

One that we find rather intriguing, and I am not endorsing anything today, I am just sort of throwing out some examples, is the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund.  This is a statewide program that has been awarding grants to residents of Arkansas for 22 years, or 20 years.  In 2008, they had 67 county affiliates.  They awarded close to 22,000 scholarships that were worth $11.5 million.  

They stay connected to their scholarship recipients while they are in college.  They, you know, if you give money, they have to show up for your meetings, so they have monthly meetings, and they come in and they give them life skills and study skills and lots of workshops, and they also mentor them.  Their graduation rate, they do, they have university people do studies of their effectiveness each year, and their graduation rate is 82% which we’d all be pretty proud of.  

The third category we call college-sponsored programs, and, there are a lot of these here/there.  Some schools there are handful of private women's schools that have really worked hard at this.  They actually build dormitories that are designed specifically for single mothers and their kids.  They have, you know, much more intentional activities on campus that are family friendly.  There are you know, there are labs that say, “No children under the age of 12 allowed in the computer lab on college campuses.”  Well, it's a problem if you've got an 8-year-old.  

So, these schools have really done a good job, but a lot of what they do is not easy for us to replicate at OU or OSU, for instance.  But, a lot of these programs are located at community colleges because community colleges really do seem to be the entry point for single moms coming back to school.  And, they have names like SOAR.  I like that one.  And, Family Economic Security Program.  

A good example of offerings are those like the University of Wisconsin at Madison offers.  And I know you have to, for those of us who are bifocal challenged, you have to really squint, but I did do the front page on my handout of what Madison lists, so you get a sense of the kinds of things that they offer.  Let me add that there are, in our defense, there are programs that are beneficial for single mothers at every college campus in Oklahoma.  We’re just not doing a particularly good job of marketing those programs, especially to students who are still at the stage of saying, “Can I even go to college?  And if I do go to college, where would I go to college, and how do I handle work and kids and school?” 

So, one part of what the SMART team is doing is developing recommendations about outreach, both to prospective students and single-mother students already enrolled in terms of how do we reach them and how do we help them reach one another, and how do we hook them up with adult mentors?  Especially peer mentors who can say, “I did it.  I've been through it.  You can do it.”  

So we are looking at, you know, Facebook and Twitter and videos on YouTube, and clubs on campus, which occur occasionally, and then they fade away because one single mother, you know, took the lead, and then she graduated.  So, you ask the school, “Do you have a special program for single mothers on your campus?”  And they say, “Well we did.” You say, “Well would you find out if it is still there?”  And they come back and say, “No, she graduated.” So, you know, we’re
looking at how do we build that infrastructure that doesn't go away?  

The final category, and it's probably more ambitious than the Women's Foundation may feel like taking on in the short run, but we find rather intriguing, are what we call multi-state agency/statewide programs.  Some states have created a very easy-to-find, simplified system for low-income single parents where they can apply for admission and also find out about financial assistance that they can get.  And often these programs cover all tuition after the student has depleted their eligibility for Pell Grants.  We’re going to take the fed money as long
as we can, and then we use the state money.

It covers books.  It covers childcare.  It covers a transportation subsidy.  It covers emergency lending, rotating lending fund.  If you, you know, have a flat tire and find that’s the difference between you staying in school this semester and not.  Maine has a program called Parents of Scholars.  It is a little unique because it was actually created by the state legislature.  Most of the others really were just a coming together of what in our state would be DHS, Higher Ed, Career Tech, Workforce, some other agencies.  

These tend to have career pathways associated with them and their name, and one that we find kind of intriguing is the Arkansas Career Pathways Initiative which was implemented in 2005, and I’ve given you some information, I think on the second page, about that one.  The Arkansas Department of Higher Education took the lead and also the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services.  It targets TANF-eligible students enrolled in 2-year colleges.  

Participants have a success rate 16 points higher than other community college students.  Over 20,000 adults have enrolled.  Over 15,000 certificates and degrees have been awarded.  That’s just since 2005.  And, what I like about it is, you go to the website, and it says, “If you’re on TANF or SNAP, or if you are eligible for TANF or SNAP but aren't taking it right now, either because you've used up your eligibility or because you’re waiting, or if you lived 200% below the federal poverty line, proceed. (laughs)  Click here.” 

And, so it is you are a single parent.  What did I say?  Did I say both?

Audience Member: You said below or both.  

Jean Larkin (continues): Oh sorry.  So, you know it’s easy to find.  It’s a website, and when you get there, it's for single mothers and fathers, but the predominant group of audience that we are looking at is single moms.  And, it just leads you right into that process of finding out, you know, what schools are participating in it, and in Arkansas it's all 22 of their community colleges.  

So, there’s much more to our program.  We're doing a lot of things in conjunction with developing these recommendations, but you know, ultimately, it brings to the Women's Foundation in June an array of options, some they can fund, some they may take to other foundations or organizations in Oklahoma or corporations who might want to put some money in.  

But, mostly our bottom line is that we want to find these single mothers raising kids in Oklahoma and especially the ones who are low income, and help them get into a situation where they can raise their level of education so that they can find their way out of poverty.