Document Tag: parenting students
Breaking Barriers: The Hidden Struggles of Student Parents and Housing Insecurity (2025)
Housing insecurity creates significant barriers for student parents, jeopardizing their academic success, economic mobility, and mental health. Addressing these issues through targeted interventions is crucial to support this vulnerable population and ensure they have the opportunity to complete their degrees and improve their families’ long-term outcomes.
What Students Want: Students’ Experiences and the Implications of Enhanced Holistic Supports for Non-Degree Pathways (2024)
What Students Want: Students’ Experiences and the Implications of Enhanced Holistic Supports for Non-Degree Pathways unveils that students and workers pursuing non-degree pathways are navigating higher education systems not designed with their realities in mind, and provides insights on the supports they need to succeed.
Highlights include:
The need for financial and holistic supports like childcare, transportation, and coaching.
Real stories from students balancing family, work, and education to build better futures.
Policy recommendations to make non-degree programs equitable and accessible.
The Financial Well-Being of Parents Pursuing Postsecondary Education (2024)
This new brief published by the SPARK Collaborative uses 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) data to document student parents’ living expenses, the resources student parents leverage to attend postsecondary education, and the gaps student parents face between their expenses and their resources.
The Financial Well-Being of Parents Pursuing Postsecondary Education (2024)
This new brief published by the SPARK Collaborative uses 2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) data to document student parents’ living expenses, the resources student parents leverage to attend postsecondary education, and the gaps student parents face between their expenses and their resources.
Parenting in a Pandemic: Understanding the Challenges Faced by California Community College Students and Actionable Recommendations for Policy (2024)
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented numerous challenges to students across the United States, particularly those
who are parents enrolled in community colleges. California’s community college system serves a diverse student
population, including a significant number of non-traditional, working adults who are also parents. These students
have faced unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic, including the difficulties of balancing childcare
responsibilities with academic and professional obligations. This paper summarizes the preliminary findings of a
study that intends to contribute to the crucial conversation around childcare needs among community college
students. The focus of this study was understanding the experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)
mothers with young children and the impact of COVID-19 on their educational experiences in community colleges
across the state of California.
The Taxpayer Benefits of Supporting Student Parents: An Analysis of Three Policy Options for Virginia’s Public Colleges (2024)
Nationally, approximately one in six undergraduates at public colleges are student
parents. In Virginia, the figure is one in eight. Being a student parent means pursuing a
college degree while caring for a child, and despite earning similar or better average
grades than their childless peers (Reichlin Cruse et al. 2019), student parents are about
twice as likely to leave college before graduating. Supporting this population can
promote college access, boost degree attainment, and enhance state economic
competitiveness. This brief considers three options for increasing graduation rates
among student parents in Virginia public colleges: establish a comprehensive student-parent support program on each campus, distribute grant aid, and expand on-campus
child care. This analysis suggests that all three options have a positive return on
investment to taxpayers. The creation of a comprehensive student-parent support
program has the highest return on investment: Every dollar invested in this program
would yield an estimated $5.36 in tax revenue and public-benefit savings, resulting in an
estimated $1.9 billion in public benefit net of costs by 2035. This is only based on
estimated growth in federal, state, and local tax revenue and decreases in benefit program costs; it does not include the many individual, family, and social benefits from
degree attainment, which would provide additional returns.
Advancing Equity in Attainment for Black Single Mothers in College: Understanding Their Needs and Supporting Their Success (2024)
As part of its broader Student Parent
Success Initiative, IWPR conducted
original research focusing specifically on
Black single mother students. This report
summarizes findings from 25 interviews
IWPR conducted with Black single mother
community college students, consisting of
both students who were enrolled at the
time of the interview and those who had
been enrolled in the prior five years. These
interviews provide insight into how college
settings promote or inhibit the success of
Black single mother community college
students, how Black single mother students
engage with institutional resources, which
of these resources they find beneficial, and
how institutional resources can better serve
their needs.