Every Number Tells a Story. Choose Yours.
Our giving levels reflect real data from IWPR’s research—because evidence shapes not just our work, but how we invite you to support it.
By Kat Londsdorf
Ever heard that term? It’s used for a student who is also a parent, and there are nearly 5 million of them in colleges around the country. That’s over a quarter of the undergraduate population, and that number has gone up by around a million since 2011.
It can be really, really expensive to be a student parent, especially if you need to pay for child care while you’re in class.
In some states, child care for an infant can cost as much as $17,062 a year, according to a report by Child Care Aware of America. Add that on to the ever-rising cost of college tuition — both private and public — and the financial strain of getting a college education becomes a huge burden for low-income parents. So much so that only a third of student parents get a degree within six years, often citing mounting debt as a reason for dropping out.
“What it comes down to is that college becomes a bit of an impossibility for a low-income parent who needs child care to go to school,” says Barbara Gault, vice president and executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, an organization that’s done a lot of research on student parents.
The primary source of federal aid for child care nationwide comes from something called the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — specifically for low-income parents and families. A block grant means that every state can develop its own eligibility requirements, which means it’s tricky to know if you qualify.
States have unique education-specific rules attached to the CCDBG — basically a bunch of extra hurdles student parents have to clear. Gault, along with a team of other researchers at IWPR, recently compiled requirements from all the states to get a snapshot of what student parents are up against.