Higher education is one of the most powerful pathways to economic mobility and long-term financial security for women, students of color, and others who have historically faced systemic barriers to opportunity. For student parents, first-generation students, and nontraditional learners, earning a degree can be transformative, opening doors to better-paying careers and greater independence for themselves and their families.
Yet the path to degree attainment is far from equal. Student parents face compounding barriers, including higher costs, limited access to child care, insecurity around basic needs, and a lack of institutional support, that make persistence and completion significantly harder. Gaps in civil rights protections leave pregnant and parenting students, LGBTQIA+ students, and students of color without the safety and resources they need to thrive. Removing these barriers isn’t just about individual success—it’s about ensuring that higher education fulfills its promise as an engine of equity and upward mobility for everyone.
Featured Policy Solutions
Improve data collection on parenting students to better understand their needs.
Policymakers at the federal, state, and institutional levels should seek mechanisms for expanding the information collected on student parents and other nontraditional and underserved students to gain a better understanding of their specific priorities and needs, as well as better details about their lives, size of their families, financial obligations, and degree completion.
Ensure that child care is available and accessible to parenting students, particularly on campus.
This includes improved investments in federal programs, such as the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program, which provides grants to institutions to enable them to provide campus-based child care services for low-income student parents. Increased funding for CCAMPIS could help ensure that student parents have guaranteed child care resources within proximity to their classes. Policymakers should further increase investments in other federal child care support programs for low-income parents, including the Child Care Development Block Grant, and ensure that these programs are accessible to student parents by including education and study as covered activities.
Support postsecondary students’ access to basic needs support programs.
Under existing criteria, many parenting students may be eligible for, but not accessing the benefits of, such programs as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF), and the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8). Policymakers should look at options to promote on-campus awareness of these programs and for ways to make it easier for students to apply, including simplifying application processes, establishing liaison offices on campuses to help students apply, and broadly sharing information about programs and eligibility in postsecondary educational settings.
