While adults without any post-secondary education made up the majority of participants in four key social safety net programs, college-educated adults account for over a third of some programs’ recipients.
These findings come from tables recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau, which provide detailed information on program participation and income transfers in 2017 from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
The education profiles of recipients varied across programs. Those with a high school diploma or less accounted for over half of WIC participants and about three-quarters of SSI recipients.
But those with college degrees (either an associate or a bachelor’s degree) accounted for as many as one in five of some programs’ participants. They made up 19.4% of WIC recipients, for example.
More than one in three adults receiving SNAP had attended at least some college classes and about one in seven had earned a college degree. SNAP provides food assistance to families below certain income thresholds.
The data show, for example, that while 52.9% of all bachelor’s degree holders were women, 63.6% of SNAP recipients with a bachelor’s degree were women.
Similarly, Black people made up 8.9% of all adults with a bachelor’s degree. But Black people were a quarter (25.3%) of those with a bachelor’s degree who were also getting SNAP.
The same pattern holds for Hispanic adults. They made up about 8.7% of all adults with a bachelor’s degree but 18.1% of those with a bachelor’s degree who received SNAP were Hispanic people.
There were also clear differences by marital status and the presence of children in the household.
Bachelor’s degree holders receiving SNAP were less likely than all bachelor’s degree holders to be married (38.4% compared to 63.9%), more likely to be divorced or separated (27.0% compared to 10.1%), and more likely to have children under 18 in the household (39.0% compared to 30.9%).