Student Parents Need Better Childcare Options

America’s childcare crisis is out of control. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, childcare was prohibitively expensive–and hard to access–for millions of Americans. Since the onset of COVID-19, things have gotten even worse: childcare is unaffordable in every state, 34 percent of working parents struggle to find care for their children, and 75 percent of child care providers expect devastating impacts on their programs when federal relief funding expires in 2024. Nearly 16,000 childcare centers and childcare programs closed between 2019 and 2021, a concerning reality that likely exacerbated racial and economic inequality.

While the childcare crisis affects families nationwide–especially those with low incomes–one group of parents have particularly unmet childcare needs: college students. For the nearly 5 million student parents who make up 26% of all undergraduates, childcare can be a significant barrier to college enrollment and completion. Despite earning higher GPAs than their peers without children, student parents are far less likely to complete their degrees, in large part because of childcare concerns. In fact, only 28 percent of single mothers who started college between 2003 and 2009 completed their program within 6 years. To make matters worse, the number of community colleges offering on-campus child care significantly declined between 2003 and 2015, a troubling trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community colleges play a particularly important role in serving student parents. Nearly 42 percent of all student parents attend community colleges, yet community colleges frequently lack the resources necessary to provide students with accessible, high-quality, on-campus childcare. And when community colleges do offer childcare, they do not always do so in ways that meet the needs of student parents. For example, colleges do not always offer care in evenings, a time when many adult students need care to attend class after their workdays. This suggests that having on-campus childcare is not enough: colleges need to ensure their childcare options can actually benefit their parenting students.

Despite the significant gaps in our childcare system, colleges and the federal government can work to expand the supply of high-quality, affordable childcare for student parents. Colleges and the federal government should do the following to ensure all student parents have affordable child care that meets their needs:

The Federal Governments Should Increase Funding to Establish On-Campus Childcare Centers

The federal government should increase its investment in on-campus childcare centers so colleges can help meet their student parents’ needs. Doing so will improve academic and economic outcomes for parenting students while also supporting child development.

To do this effectively, the federal government should increase its investment in on-campus childcare centers through the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. CCAMPIS funds allow colleges to establish on-campus centers for Pell-eligible students, which helps ensure students with the least financial resources have access to the childcare they need to attend school. CCAMPIS is the only federal program dedicated to meeting the childcare needs of parenting students, yet insufficient funding–as well as programmatic design–limits the effectiveness of the program. Given how unaffordable childcare is, the federal government should expand CCAMPIS to serve a broader swath of parenting students and should ensure CCAMPIS funds go directly to ensuring colleges have capacity to provide parenting students with high-quality childcare.

Colleges Should Ensure On-Campus Centers Meet Student Parents Needs

While it's important that state and federal governments increase their investment in on-campus childcare centers, it’s also important that on-campus centers are designed to meet student parents' needs. Specifically, on-campus centers should offer care in mornings and evenings and should offer drop-in care so that parenting students can bring their children to childcare when they need to attend class. If colleges can offer drop-in care whenever parents need to come to campus, they will be able to offer childcare that actually works for the parents they serve. On-campus, full-day childcare that only exists during traditional workday hours does not always align with what student parents actually need. Colleges need to evaluate their on-campus centers to see if they can better structure their childcare offerings to align with student parents’ schedules.

Colleges Should Partner With Community-Based Providers to Help Students Access Care

Colleges should also partner with nearby childcare providers to offer affordable, high-quality care for their student parents. Using CCAMPIS funding, colleges can partner with local providers to provide drop-in services for parenting students. This can be an effective model for colleges to offer their students high-quality childcare without needing to dramatically expand the scope of on-campus services. The Community College of Baltimore County’s partnership with the Sanbridge Early Learning Center offers a promising example of a college working directly with a community-based partner to offer quality childcare options for their students. In this partnership, the Community College of Baltimore and their partner childcare provider offer flexible, drop-in care for students living throughout the region, and they also provide an on campus center.

If colleges and the federal government enact these recommendations, they will help student parents access high-quality, affordable care. In doing so, colleges and the federal government can advance educational and economic equity by improving academic outcomes for parenting students.

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