Report

“On a Journey for Families: Lessons Learned from Colleges Investing in Student Parents,” offers insights and take-aways from our 2021-2023 FamilyU Cohort. The report outlines how the FamilyU Cohort enhanced student parent work at each of the four participating institutions, impacting approximately 25,000 student parents across their campuses.

Over our two-year partnership with George Mason University, Montgomery College, Northern Virginia Community College, and Trinity Washington University, we saw first hand the challenges and opportunities for impact when institutionalizing student parent supports, and we’re proud to share our lessons learned.

Download the report.

We invite you to engage in one (or both) of the following activities to help get the word out about this report:

• Join our X/Twitter Chat on Wednesday, October 11th at 1PM ET/10AM PT to talk about the report and its major findings and to hear from our friends and partners in this work.

• Spread the word! Please use this social media toolkit to quickly and easily share the report with your networks. 

Highlights from the report include:

• Student parent work is racial equity work. 100% of the institutions that participated in the 2021 FamilyU Cohort reported applying an equity-driven student parent lens to policy development and evaluation as a result of participating in FamilyU.

• Real change (nearly) always starts with student parent data and awareness. While most colleges and universities across the country have no idea how many of their students are parenting, all of the 2021 FamilyU Cohort institutions are now collecting students’ parenting status and disaggregating the data across the intersecting identities of race, marital status, gender, sex, and student classification.

• Value the lived expertise of student parents. Each of the four institutional teams had a Student Parent Fellow, a current parenting student at their institution, working alongside them to identify opportunities to enhance the school's student parent work. This was a fully compensated position covered by Generation Hope.

• While each institution is different, we still learn from one another. This cohort included 3 Minority Serving Institutions, 1 Predominantly White Institution, 2 Four-Year Universities, 2 Community Colleges, and 13 campuses across the mid-Atlantic region representing 25,000 student parents.

Press Release