Welfare

I'm having fun just trying to figure stuff out and learned a lot but it seems like I'm missing a link when it comes to raising my welfare. I have been keeping my education around 100 to keep low level workers for new corps; is this my mistake?
My country is Alphilect on White Giant
much love to the community

Not neccesarily, there's lots to consider.

social security - set to 80% so your SS index is 102.
Health and transport should be over 100, the education index could be higher but like you found, it will use up your low level workers.
Salaries make a little difference but mainly in corps production.

Just about everything effects welfare but the top 4 items are SS, ed, health, transport, I would say.

Tip: For education and transport, you will see there are 3 different indexes (like roads, traintracks and water or schools, highschools and unis), each of these 3 indexes should be about the same as the game will use the lowest of the three. So its a waste of money to have twice the roads index than water index.

Tip 2: Again for edu and trans, the index is a linear realation to the number of items, so if it says 1000 needed for 100 (good quality) index then 2000 will give 200 index, 1500 a 150

Financial index plays an important role to. But a little more difficult to manipulate. I've noticed quite a big swing in the FI when my economy fell apart.