It’s Hard to Be a Student Parent. I Know, I Have Been One for Many, Many Years

College students who are parenting must juggle work and family responsibilities while going to school and often struggle to find child care. It’s also expensive. The costs of child care, tuition, books, and attending to basic needs — not to mention one’s own physical and mental well-being — can quickly add up. Child care and college tuition costs alone can be insurmountable obstacles for those who are only trying to make a better life for themselves and their little ones.

In continuation of Ed Trust’s affordability gap work — with support from Imaginable Futures and in partnership with Generation Hope — we conducted an analysis for student parents. In For Student Parents, The Biggest Hurdles to a Higher Education are Costs and Finding Child Care, we tally the cost of child care and the price of attending a public four-year college — including tuition and fees, housing, food, books, and transportation — to determine a student parent’s actual annual cost of pursuing a degree.

Key Findings:

• There is no state in which a student parent can work 10 hours per week at the minimum wage and afford both tuition and child care at a public college or university.
• The out-of-pocket cost of attending a public college is 2 to 5 times higher for student parents than for their other low-income peers without children.
• A student parent would need to work 52 hours per week, on average, to cover child care and tuition costs at a four-year public college or university in the U.S.

Campus leaders, and federal and state policymakers must do more to support student parents, who are disproportionately single, students of color, and from low-income backgrounds. Our recommendations attempt to address the needs of the whole student parent and their children, while advocating for more affordable child care and access to supports that would indirectly reduce the student parent affordability gap.

Cheers,
Brittani
Explore Our Recommendations for Federal, State, and Campus Leaders