July 5, 2016
Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece for the New York Times about undergraduates who are raising children:
In the last year or so, dozens of employers — from the Navy to Goldman Sachs — have begun offering or expanding benefits like paid family leave and job-sharing that enable parents to better balance work with family life. Slowly, America’s famously family-unfriendly workplace might finally be improving. But the only employees who really stand to benefit are white-collar ones. Since the 1960s, paid parental leave increased nearly five times for workers with a college degree, but it has only doubled for those with just a high school degree.
There’s one big obstacle standing in the way of working parents getting these quality jobs: a college degree. And colleges are doing far too little to help them.
There are 4.8 million undergraduates raising children — one-fourth of all postsecondary students. But more than half of these student-parents leave college without finishing after six years. Their lack of a degree essentially locks them out of jobs with benefits like on-site child care, paid leave and telecommuting that make it possible to be effective workers and parents.
Nearly half of student-parents attend community colleges, and a quarter of them enroll at for-profit institutions. Some are lured to these institutions by their flexibility and affordability, but too many colleges fail to provide the support students need to graduate. The same is true for many at traditional four-year institutions.