The answer is probably: give them more money.
Austin Community College has been running a support program for parenting students since the Fall of 2021, and last week Trellis Strategies, a national research firm focused on postsecondary education, released an evaluation of the effort. The results are impressive.
Trellis found that 95% of students in the program remained enrolled the next semester, compared to 75% for their peers who did not participate. Participants were also more likely to complete at least nine credits (equal to three quarter time attendance), were less likely to need emergency aid support, and borrowed $1,052 less per semester than their peers not in the program.
The Parenting Students Project is a partnership between United Way for Greater Austin and Austin Community College District. Staffing for the project is provided by United Way and Austin CCD, with funding coming from a private donor.
There are three million college students with kids working on undergraduate degrees, but they often take a long time to complete or drop out because of how difficult it is to go to college with kids in tow.
What Support Did Parenting Students Receive?
To be eligible for the program, students had to be enrolled in at least nine credits, the equivalent of three-quarter time enrollment, and have one or more children under age 12. The program has supported 95 students and 137 children since it was started in 2021.
Students in the program receive a $500 monthly stipend while they are participating and meeting the enrollment criteria, as well as enhanced academic advising, mental health support, and if they applied, a scholarship to help pay for childcare.
How Was The Program Evaluated?
To conduct their research, Trellis compared the academic records of the 95 students who have participated in the program so far to the records of over 7,000 students with children enrolled over the same period. The researchers compared GPA, retention and completion rates, as well as interviewing participants about the non-academic benefits they experienced from the program.
In addition to the improved retention, students in the program were more likely to graduate, and told researchers that the program offered a vital lifeline when they ran into emergencies, allowing them to stay in school instead of stopping out.
As importantly as improved academic achievement are the mental health and family life benefits that students in the program reported. Students interviewed by the research team said that they were able to reduce their work hours a little and spend more time with their children without having to sacrifice working toward completing their education.
Other participants said the program gave them a sense of community, and improved their confidence, with one participant saying that “Just knowing that there’s other student parents out there makes me feel better. Because if they’re doing it, I can continue to do this.”
The evaluation does note that there is room to improve the program, by including more student fathers, who were underrepresented in the project. The researchers also found that some participants found applying for the childcare scholarship, as well as finding suitable childcare, was challenging.
What Does Other Research On Parenting Students Show?
Research from the Urban Institute has shown that parenting students do just as well, if not slightly better academically than their peers without children. The things that tend to derail their college journeys are non-academic challenges, like juggling work, childcare and school,
Prior research from Trellis has found that parenting students often face severe time poverty, with competing demands from their jobs, parenting and school. Trellis has found that 72% of parenting students work on top of attending school, with 66% working forty or more hours a week on top of their academic requirements and responsibilities as a parent. Only 34% of non-parents in college report working a similar number of hours.
When the time demands of school, work and parenting come into conflict with each other, parents—unsurprisingly—put getting food on the table, and caring for their children ahead of completing college classwork.
One of the lessons from the Austin PSP program is the multiplication effect that supporting the success of parenting students can have. Providing support for the 95 parents who have participated so far also meant supporting the 137 children of those students, and less directly the spouses and partners of the students in relationships.
What Other Support Is There For Parenting Students?
Programs like Austin Community College’s are part of a bigger movement to provided improved support for parenting students in some states and at some colleges. California has passed legislation requiring public colleges to provide parenting students with priority registration for classes, and better estimates of the cost of college, including childcare and family housing, for parenting students.
The Texas legislature passed multiple bills related to student parent issues in 2023. As a result, Texas college now designated liaisons who can help connect parenting students to resources, as well as provide them with priority registration, similar to California’s legislation.
The 2023 Texas law also mandates that public colleges and universities in Texas collect data on how many parenting students they have on campus. Better data on how many parenting students are on campus has been a long-term goal of advocates for parenting students. It is challenging to figure out how best to serve students with children if colleges do not know who they are, how many kids they have and how old those children are.
The Maryland State legislature is currently considering legislation on improving data collection on parenting students enrolled at Maryland colleges. That legislation has been passed on the house side of the legislature and is now under consideration by the Maryland state senate.
As parenting student supports start to proliferate, the next question is whether policymakers will be willing to properly fund them, so they can be scaled up, and do not need to rely on private philanthropy alone for success.