Report Overview
Uncovering the Student Parent Experience and its Impact on College Success
One in five of today’s college students is a parent, and yet they remain a largely invisible population on campus. The vast majority of institutions do not track parenting status, meaning they do not know how many student parents they may have at any given time. Generation Hope, in partnership with Imaginable Futures, Chegg.org, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, launched a national student parent survey to gain insight into the experience of parenting college students. The findings, detailed in our new report, shed light on an incredibly tenacious and driven student population that largely feels unwelcome and disconnected as a result of significant gaps in campus culture, policies, and physical space.
“I feel like I have no guide. I feel like there is no one like me walking around campus.”
- National Student Parent Survey Respondent
Top Findings
High numbers of student parents feel disconnected from their college community: Nearly half of respondents said they felt somewhat disconnected or very disconnected from their college community, and 40% indicated that they agreed or strongly agreed that they felt isolated as a parenting student on their campus.
Overall, 20% of respondents indicated they felt either somewhat unwelcome or very unwelcome on their campuses: Broken down by race, 30% of parenting Black students and 25% of parenting Hispanic and Latino students felt either somewhat unwelcome or very unwelcome, compared to 16% of parenting White students.
Policies that embrace parenting matter: More than 60% of respondents missed at least one day of class in their last semester due to lack of childcare, with 7% missing five or more days. Most student parents, nearly 60%, did not know if there is a campus policy on whether they can bring their children to class. Even with significant childcare challenges, the Institute for Women's Policy Research found that student parents have higher GPAs than their non-parenting peers.
Student parents take note when their campuses lack family-friendly characteristics: More than a third of respondents did not see any family-friendly characteristics on their campuses. When broken down by school type, nearly a third of both community-college parenting students and four-year parenting students did not see any family-friendly characteristics on their campuses.
Student services aren’t designed for student parents: Securing childcare was one of the most difficult challenges student parents reported facing. And yet, three-quarters of respondents said that their financial aid office did not inform them that child care expenses could be taken into account in the determination of their financial aid award. That number increases to 79% for Black students.
Recommendations
Drawing on the national student parent survey findings and building on a decade of working with young, parenting college students, Generation Hope has identified recommendations for higher education institutions that want to improve their college completion and student success metrics for this population and other marginalized students:
Collect and track the parenting status of your students.
Apply a parenting-student lens to your institution’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work.
Designate a staff position to champion the needs of parenting students across your institution.
Prioritize the creation of family-friendly policies and make sure they are clearly communicated to students.
Identify ways to be more inclusive of parenting students in campus life.
Incorporate the needs of student parents in your government relations work.
Overall, this work requires more than just a program or a childcare center but rather an institution-wide lens that considers the needs of student parents in the implementation of all of its services. Click here to view the full report.
Generation Hope offers technical assistance for colleges across the country that would like to expand their capacity to serve student parents. If you are interested in this support, please contact us at info@supportgenerationhope.org.
