"The whole idea behind the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 - the formal name of the biggest reform of the federal welfare system in decades - was to push more people off the federal dole and into the work force," Inside Higher Ed reports. "But from the very beginning, some advocates for low-income Americans and for higher education feared that job gains might come at a cost, particularly in terms of access to a postsecondary education and the financial and other benefits that often accrue from it. A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research seeks to measure the extent to which those policies have reduced the educational attainment of a key constituent of welfare programs - low-educated single mothers."