CalWORKs Participation Among California’s College Students

California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), California’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, provides cash assistance to low- income families with children. CalWORKs provides parents with cash assistance for expenses such as food, housing, utilities, or medical care, and may be particularly helpful for parenting college students, who temporarily forgo earnings to invest in their education. We find that in the 2022–23 academic year, 57,400 California Community College (CCC) students and 1,200 University of California (UC) students either received CalWORKs benefits or had a household member who received benefits.1Student participants received an average of $256 per person, per month.