COVID-19 And Higher-ED
How Colleges Can Support Student Parents Through COVID-19
Colleges and universities nationwide are working tirelessly to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, balancing the safety of their faculty, staff, and students with the need to continue teaching and learning. For the past 10 years, Generation Hope has been helping teen parents navigate housing instability, food insecurity, and the challenge of finding accessible, affordable, and high-quality childcare as they pursue their degrees. We are now applying this expertise to ensuring our Scholars—and student parents nationwide—successfully navigate the unprecedented coronavirus crisis. We have compiled the following recommendations and resources to assist institutions in supporting student parents through the uncertainties and acute needs they’re facing during this time.
First, it’s important to recognize that 1 in 5 undergraduate students are parenting—nearly 4 million students nationwide. Your institution may not be tracking the parenting status of your students, but they are attending your college or university and have real, day-to-day needs that previously had the potential to derail them from college completion, and now have been exacerbated by this crisis.
It is critical to use a student-parent lens in your decision making during the pandemic, which ensures that the needs of student parents are considered. How will campus closures and reopenings impact students who rely on campus childcare, for example? If a student is parenting and juggling online learning for their children, is your institution considering those responsibilities when determining new accountability policies? Student parents often rely on campus supports and services in unique ways that can go unnoticed, and their family responsibilities supersede their role as a college student.
Convene a virtual task force of student parents to inform your decisions during the pandemic. They are the experts and will reveal the gaps and disconnects that are difficult for faculty and staff to see on their own.
Establish or increase emergency aid to cover housing expenses, loss of employment, access to technology, food, healthcare costs and more, and promote it widely to students. Ensure that requests are processed rapidly. If you do not currently have an online system for emergency aid, Edquity is offering remote emergency support, and The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice provides recommendations for how institutions of higher education should distribute emergency aid to students through the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund created in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Create as much convenience for students as possible. Student parents regularly experience “time poverty” or “time shredding,” which is essentially very little time between working, studying, and raising children. The pandemic has lessened the very little time that student parents had to begin with. Institutions must create “one-stop” entry points for students to access academic, financial, career, mental health, and other supports quickly and efficiently. Ensure students have the contact information of a real person (rather than a generic email) who they can reach out to for assistance.
Inform professors to explicitly encourage their students to contact them if they are having challenges with childcare or distance learning, and set the expectation that professors will work with students to design feasible solutions. Professors should be proactive about letting students know they understand they may have family obligations, and it’s okay for students to take care of their little ones (while muting themselves) during video lectures/instruction.
Ask student success managers or academic advisors to reach out to student parents to see how the closure is impacting them (e.g. How has the virus impacted their childcare? Do they have a safe place to live? Do they have the technology and resources they need to be successful in their classes from home? Does the campus closure prevent them from accessing mental health or medical care?) and share how the institution may be able to help. It’s okay if your coaches do not have a sense of which students are parenting. These questions can and should be asked of all students.
Understand that your institution will need to go beyond the scope of traditional advising during the pandemic to support parenting college students—and all students. Checking on their mental health, family needs, financial situations, and connections to vital community resources will be key. If your institution lacks the capacity or the expertise to do this, partner with outside organizations to fill the gaps.
Provide students with information on the new online tool SwiftStudent, which allows them to submit financial aid appeals that respond to their changing circumstances during and after the pandemic.
Build community among student parents by creating a way for them to stay in touch with one another and developing regular check-ins or virtual events to come together.
It’s important to note that parenting college students intersect with various other populations that are often marginalized, such as low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color, and that they are often facing housing and food insecurity on a regular basis. As your institution works to better support these groups, center your work in their voices, insights, and lived experiences to ensure you are truly meeting their needs.
As Generation Hope Scholar Emily says, “If colleges would support student parents and say ‘we get it,’ that would impact everything—grades, attendance, even other teen parents like me believing higher education is possible. Schools could use that to their advantage because more people would be open to going to college. And it would feel more like a united community.”
In addition to providing direct, two-generation support to teen parents in college and their children as they prepare for kindergarten, Generation Hope advocates nationally for the needs of parenting college students and provides technical assistance to colleges and universities to increase their capacity to serve this population. For more information, please contact info@supportgenerationhope.org.
