Debunking Myths on Student Parent Data Collection

One in five undergraduate students and one in four graduate students are parents, according to data analysis from SPARK Collaborative. Parenting students face unique challenges juggling school and caregiving, and pay higher non-tuition costs than their non-parenting peers because of expenses like child care and increased costs for family-appropriate housing.

Despite how prevalent parenting students are on campuses, the current data infrastructure doesn’t capture a full picture of who they are, which colleges they’re enrolled in, and what they need to succeed in school. Some national surveys including the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) provide estimates of parenting students, but they offer inconsistent definitions of “student parent,” and are limited in scope. These sources don’t report which institutions student parents are enrolled in or what their needs are. Additionally, inconsistent definitions make it difficult to understand patterns, or measure progress in addressing parenting student retention and graduation at the system, state, or federal level.

To close these opportunity gaps for parenting students, college leaders and policymakers need data to understand where parenting students are enrolled and what support they need. With growing state legislative efforts to require student parent data collection, we want to address common concerns and debunk myths about these efforts.

A 2022 Urban Institute report found that limited data on who parenting students are, how they’re faring, and what they need continues to be a major barrier to supporting their success. According to the analysis, many institutions don’t know how many of their students have children or how old those children are, which often leads to underinvestment in critical supports like child care, public benefits navigation, and financial aid expertise tailored to students with dependents.

These data blind spots limit colleges’ ability to support parenting students. With a clearer understanding of their parenting student population, colleges could make relatively small but meaningful changes on campus such as scheduling courses at better times for student parents, to allow them to accommodate their work and caregiving responsibilities. Colleges can also use data to build stronger partnerships with public schools, human service agencies, and community organizations to better support parents’ academic engagement and success.

Like other under-served student populations—such as veterans, first-generation students, and students with disabilities—using data to make their presence and needs visible helps colleges better support retention and success.

Colleges already gather extensive demographic, social, financial, and academic data on their students. Adding students’ parenting status as a data point would come at relatively low cost, especially when coordinated with existing data collection. Collecting this data on an ongoing basis helps colleges plan and identify students in need of additional support, and make adjustments to how they offer services. There are tools to help colleges learn how to do this; for example, the Urban Institute runs a Data-to-Action Campaign for Parenting Students which offers guidance to help institutions collect this data without starting from scratch and involve parenting students as co-leaders in decision-making.

The time and effort invested in collecting high-quality data on parenting students—and using those data to inform support services—can have benefits beyond this population. These efforts can serve as a blueprint for improving data collection and be used for other priority student groups.

Policymakers have raised concerns about ensuring student parent data remains private, and while this is critical, states and colleges can still build thoughtful data collection processes.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a 1974 U.S. federal law that protects the privacy of education records, and gives parents of minors and students the right to inspect their educational records, request corrections to records, and control the disclosure of their personal information. FERPA, which colleges must comply with, can serve as a framework and not a barrier for institutions to safeguard parenting student information. Colleges already maintain sensitive student information and can do so with parenting status. Colleges can also offer transparency to students explaining why they are asking about parental status, and how they will keep the data private. Students can also have the option to skip questions on institutional surveys that they don’t feel comfortable answering.

Sometimes states need to update their own data system before they can receive new data from colleges, and that could come with some short-term costs. However, these sorts of updates and processes are often routine for state data and research professionals, and the benefits to states should well exceed the costs. Ultimately, postsecondary education attainment for parenting students has shown to pay off for families, colleges, and states.

In an Urban Institute analysis of three models of how to support student parents at public colleges, all three netted a positive return to taxpayers in increased tax revenue and decreased benefit costs. This did not include the personal and multigenerational benefits to students and their families, which would result in larger returns. Student parent programs had the highest return on investment at $5.36 per $1.00 spent, while on-campus child care resulted in the largest number of additional graduates. Investing in similar programs that support student parents first requires identifying who student parents are.

No existing data source reliably identifies parenting students at the college level. Changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in 2023 through the FAFSA Simplification Act made it less useful as a tool for identifying students with dependent children—and many students did not complete the FAFSA even before those changes.

Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination, of the Higher Education Act provides important protections for pregnant and postpartum students, but it does not include requirements for institutions to collect or report data on parenting status. And only a small number of colleges voluntarily collect information that allow them to identify their student parent populations.

As a result, most estimates of students with dependent children come from national surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Census Bureau. While valuable, these data cannot be broken down at the institutional level, and rely on narrow and inconsistent definitions of “parent” that exclude students who are caring for children who are not their legal dependents. Without campus-level data, colleges are left guessing about the size, characteristics, and needs of their parenting student populations.

Only five states have passed legislation that requires data collection on parenting students: Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and California. At least four other states have introduced data collection bills over the past year: Maryland, New Jersey, Washington, and Virginia. These efforts can fill in knowledge gaps for states that want to see student parents succeed. However, each state has a different definition of who a parenting student is and requires colleges to collect different information, resulting in an uneven data patchwork.

A cohesive federal definition of parenting students would support colleges in gathering consistent data. The bipartisan Understanding Student Parents Outcomes Act, introduced in June 2025, would require colleges to ask about parental status as part of annual data collection they perform for the Department of Education, and standardize a definition of parenting student across all institutions.

A large portion of today’s college students are parents. Providing the right resources to retain and support parenting students toward graduation is to everyone’s benefit: states, colleges, and families. But appropriate supports require a clear picture of who these students are, what programs they’re enrolled in, and what they need to stay on the path to graduation. Several states and colleges have proven this can be done. It does not have to be complicated or costly to collect data that help support lasting impact for parenting students.