College Is Unaffordable For Parenting Students In All 50 States

A college education has become increasingly unaffordable for many students. New research shows that for students with children, the problem is even worse.

Approximately one out of every five students in higher education is a parent, many with young children requiring childcare while their parent is working towards a degree or other credential. Parenting students trying to get a college degree are doing exactly what society says they should do—improve their job prospects and support their families. But the high price of college combined with the high cost of childcare is a massive barrier to higher education success for most parenting students.

A new report, co-authored by Education Trust and Generation Hope, assessed college affordability for parenting students across all 50 states.

The report looks at what the authors dub the “affordability gap” to determine whether college is affordable or not in each state. They define this metric as the difference between the price of college after grants, scholarships, and ten hours a week of working at the state minimum wage. Loans are no included in the calculation. Since the report focuses on parenting students, the cost of childcare is included in the college price calculations, along with tuition and fees, housing and food, books, transportation, and a limited allowance for personal expenses.

When asked via email how parenting students are managing to pay for college, Brittani Williams, Senior Policy Analyst at Education Trust and one of the report authors said, “the reality of student parents and postsecondary persistence is, they are working the outrageous hours mentioned in the report that it takes to make it work. As a student parent during my undergraduate career I did not afford myself options that would not support parenting AND postsecondary persistence and I think that is the belief of many student parents.”

The report found that there are no states where a student can combine financial aid with earnings from ten hours of work to pay for college and either center based or at home childcare . Additionally, the research found that out-of-pocket costs are anywhere from two to five times higher for parenting students than they are for their peers who do not have children. This disparity is largely the result of the high cost of childcare, which exceeds tuition in some states. The report also found that student parents would need to work 52 hours per week in order to pay for the average cost of attending a four-year college and paying for childcare.

In most cases, childcare is not even factored into a parenting student’s college expenses for financial aid purposes unless they explicitly request that it be added, something many parenting students do not know is an option. Some financial aid offices will proactively contact parenting students to see if they have childcare costs, but the practice is rare. Moreover, many institutions lack the funds to offer any additional financial aid to students with children, leaving taking out more student loans as the only option for schools to provide additional financial support to parenting students.

Some states come out worse than others for parenting student affordability, with Washington, DC, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York proving to be the least affordable locations when the cost of center-based childcare is factored in. In comparison, Florida, Michigan, Washington, and Louisiana are the most affordable. Although, with an affordability gap of $12,587 in Florida, the state that is “most affordable” for parenting students, affordable might be a poor descriptor.

On campus childcare is a vital child care option for parenting students because it provides ease of accessibility, but the report points out that on campus childcare options are shrinking, not growing. There is a federally funded program designed to support childcare centers on college campuses, the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program (CCAMPIS), but it is vastly underfunded, limiting the number of colleges who can provide on campus childcare. It is clear that the limited child care options, both on and off campus contributes to the lack of college affordability for parenting students.

The report provides recommendations for policymakers at the state and federal level, as well as college leaders, on how to improve support for parenting students. At the federal level, these recommendations include collecting data on student parents to help colleges determine how many parenting students they have on campus. The report also argues for increasing funding for the CCAMPIS program to $500 million, doubling the Pell grant, and restoring the child tax credit.

At the state level, the report suggests expanding childcare options near college campuses, including programs like Head Start and prioritizing funds from the Child Care and Development Block Grant program (CCDBG) for childcare centers on college campuses. For institutions, the recommendations include automatically including childcare in parenting students’ college costs and giving priority access to on campus childcare over staff and faculty.

Williams also said that some of the top priorities for policymakers should be including childcare costs in students COA automatically, giving them priority registration to help parenting students manage complex schedules and ensure campus-based daycares have increased capacity.

There is a very clear takeaway from this report. Parenting students who succeed in obtaining a college credential do so by overcoming odds that are stacked against them. They need and deserve more help.