via Diverse: Most Student Parents Cannot Afford College and Childcare
by Liann Herder
Student parents must work an average of 52 hours a week, on top of their full-time classes, in order to pay for both school and childcare.
That’s the finding from a new report by The Education Trust, a nonprofit organization working to close equity gaps in educational opportunities, and Generation Hope, a nonprofit advocacy group working to help student parents succeed and achieve economic mobility.
There are nearly five million student parents currently attending a postsecondary institution, making up 20% of all students. Student parents are more likely to belong to marginalized groups and live at or near the poverty line. The cost of college is rising, as is the cost of living and childcare thanks to the pandemic and inflation.
The report, For Student Parents, the Biggest Hurdles to a Higher Education are Cost and Finding Child Care, gathers data on the affordability of college for student parents and makes recommendations at federal, state, and institutional levels. Suggestions include doubling the Pell Grant, raising minimum wage, including childcare costs in financial aid packages, collecting data on parenting students, and offering high-quality, low-cost childcare on or near campus. The report also urges institutions to be more supportive of the complicated schedules student parents have, offering them first-choice at registration.
“Higher education wasn’t designed for parenting students,” said Nicole Lynn Lewis, founder and CEO of Generation Hope. “Looking at how many hours a week student parents have to work to cover all the costs of going to school—52 hours a week to work—how much time does that leave for them to devote to studies? It’s hard to argue that a 52-hour work week is acceptable for someone to do well in their courses.”
To arrive at this average number of working hours, Ed Trust and Generation Hope examined the net price for attending a public, four-year institution as a low-income student parent in all 50 states and Washington D.C., including transportation, housing, textbooks, and scholarships or grants given. Then, they added minimum wage income earned from working a job for 10 hours a week, Ed Trust’s recommended working schedule. The expected cost of childcare in each state was then subtracted from the total, leaving what the report calls “the student parent affordability gap.”
“The biggest take-away is that there’s no state where a student can work 10 hours at minimum wage and pay both tuition and childcare,” said Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at Ed Trust. “Net price alone isn’t a good indicator of affordability. It’s hard for student parents to know what their costs are going to be.”