Child Care Centers on Campus Alone Don’t Solve the Problem

Blog Post
A woman works on a computer holding a baby
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
Jan. 29, 2025

This blog series explores the issue of child care support for parenting students at community colleges. Drawing on insights from New America’s qualitative research conducted with ten community colleges, each post will share strategies, real-world examples, and lessons learned that can help improve childcare access and support for student parents nationwide.

Policymakers and advocates often view child care centers on college campuses as a solution for student parents looking for adequate care. That is why there has been so much alarm about declining access to this option. The share of public college campuses with child care centers has dropped significantly, decreasing from 59 percent in 2004 to just 45 percent in 2019. The most dramatic reduction, nearly 17 percentage points, has occurred at community colleges, which enroll the highest proportion of student parents. In fact, during a recent research project, we interviewed leaders at four community colleges that had closed their on-campus centers.

Much of the advocacy for student parents focuses on reversing this trend and opening more centers. After all, if your college offers child care, you are all set, right? Wrong.

In our project focused on supporting child care for student parents, we saw many lovely, tiny centers on community college campuses. Through a competitive application process, we studied five community colleges with unusually impressive child care offerings. Although these colleges stood out as leaders in child care access, their on-campus centers accommodated an average of fewer than 60 children, despite serving campuses with thousands of students. Most of the centers also enrolled the children of faculty, staff, and community members, leaving an average of only 26 slots for the children of students. No center supported more than 3 percent of the estimated number of degree-seeking parenting students at the college. Unsurprisingly, students hoping to use the center faced long waitlists at almost all of the centers.

If college child care centers are not meeting the needs of most of their parenting students, it is partially because they are not designed to. Many on-campus child care centers are focused on providing early childhood education students with hands-on learning experiences and supporting parenting students is a secondary goal. The budget often reflects on-campus centers' status as an auxiliary service rather than a key student support. Child care centers are expected to break even at many community colleges, receiving only space and utilities assistance from the college. To meet these financial constraints, centers sometimes must limit operating hours and charge student parents near market-rate costs—particularly if the center has not secured the competitive federal CCAMPIS grant.

While these centers provide exceptional child care for a few children and high-quality training for college students in early childhood education programs, they do not solve the child care crisis for most student parents. Yet, in the course of our research, we came across several colleges working hard to orient their on-campus centers around the needs of student parents, while experimenting with other ways to scale support for child care.

Prioritizing Students: Madison Area Technical College

One of the best examples of creating a center to prioritize and meet student needs we uncovered in our research was at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin. The college hosts a child care center in a dedicated building on its main campus, and the center is run with the needs of student parents in mind. The center currently serves 50 children aged six weeks to six years—a clear majority of whom (about 70 percent) have parents attending the college.

The college works hard to make the childcare affordable for student families. Families pay tuition on a sliding fee scale and may receive various types of financial support, including CCAMPIS scholarships, city and state (CCDF) childcare subsidy programs, and privately funded scholarships. When filling slots from a waitlist of 85 families, the center prioritizes the children of students who receive a Pell Grant, then other student parents, then staff/faculty and, finally, community members.

While the center is a lifeline for the students who use it, leaders at Madison College know it falls short of meeting the needs of the college’s parenting students, and are working hard to bridge the gap. They recently expanded the main center to serve 30 more children.

The college also plans to build a brand new center on another campus, which serves more low-income and parenting students than the main campus. After raising over $6 million, Madison is almost ready to break ground on a new child care center that would serve 50 to 100 students, depending on the success of additional fundraising. Altogether, Madison’s on-campus care could one day serve up to 160 children. Thanks to dedicated college leadership, a CCAMPIS grant, other federal grants, and impressive fundraising, Madison Area Technical College is scaling up its on-campus care, providing a child care solution for more of its students.

A More Flexible Center: Utah Valley University

Another way for on-campus centers to serve student parents is to increase the flexibility of the care offered. Utah Valley University runs a nationally accredited child center, Wee Care, that serves only children of student parents six weeks to six years old. Because of the scheduling flexibility, UVU’s Wee Care can serve more children than typical centers. Enrollment fluctuates between 180 and 225 children.

Instead of only offering a full-day center experience, it allows students to sign up for the childcare hours they need to cover their class schedule as well as additional hours to cover studying or meetings on campus. Qualifying students pay a sliding scale from $1.50 to $6.00 an hour based on financial need, no matter how many children they have enrolled in the center. Wee Care has an early registration deadline that is prioritized based on student needs. Those students are slotted into care for their class times, and the center continues to accept enrollment applications until they are full. In the fall of 2024, UVU opened a drop-in care center, Hourly Kit Care, providing students with even more flexible care.

Utah Valley can support this effort thanks to a generous donation for the building it is located in, other fundraising, and its CCAMPIS grant.

Other Forms of Child Care Support

But for many colleges, including many who long ago shuttered their centers, starting up and sustaining a child care center on campus is not a viable option. At the same time, resource-intensive on-campus child care centers are unlikely ever to meet the needs of all the student parents who need support. That is where subsidies and referrals come in.

Colleges like Forsyth Technical College and Linn Benton Community College have strong relationships with their local Resource and Referral Centers. Linn Benton even has its Resource and Referral Center on campus. These entities, funded through the federal Child Care Development Block Grant, help people, including student parents, locate child care that works for them in their community. With support to access the subsidy from CCDF or raising funds from local philanthropy or state grants, colleges can help student parents access care that works for them. Plugging into the existing child care infrastructure can be the best way to scale support for student parents who can't get a limited space in on-campus care.

Conclusion

While students told us on-campus child care centers were a huge help in completing their studies, many students will never have access to them. After doing as much as possible to invest in direct help to students, colleges must expand access to flexible, community-based care through partnerships, subsidies, and referrals to connect its remaining student parents to support. Institutions committed to these strategies demonstrate that meaningful change is possible, even beyond the traditional campus child care model. Given all of the shortcomings of on-campus child care centers, researchers and policymakers should not see the number of colleges with on-campus care as a sufficient measure of the support for child care on college campuses. Ultimately, increasing federal, state, and local funding is necessary to make these partnerships and subsidies more accessible and high-quality for student parents whose children are in community-based child care settings.

Related Topics
Child Care on Community College Campuses Project