The Fight for a Secure Future
At least one in five of today’s college students is parenting a child while enrolled in classes. Parenting students and their children stand to gain significantly if they complete their degrees, including improved social, economic, and health outcomes. In our ongoing commitment to #RealCollege students, The Hope Center has partnered with Imaginable Futures and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to help improve the ability of higher education’s institutional leaders, practitioners, and policymakers to identify solutions that remove the barriers to parenting students’ educational success.
Over the coming year, we will analyze data from the Hope Center and other sources to produce a set of materials and engagement opportunities that advance the body of empirical evidence on the unique experiences of parenting students.
Our annual #RealCollege report provides new evidence about parenting students. Our newest report found that 70% of parenting students experienced basic needs insecurity, while the rate among non-parenting students was 55%. Similarly, housing challenges were especially prominent for parenting students, who were 15 percentage points more likely than non-parenting students to experience housing insecurity. Please see the full report for more details.
In conjunction with the release of our annual #RealCollege report, we are offering several opportunities to engage with the Hope Center’s data on parenting students’ basic needs insecurity, including an upcoming fact sheet that summarizes our initial findings.
Our partners at the JED Foundation & Ascend at the Aspen Institute have conducted a special analysis of the Hope Center’s data on parenting students to underscore the mental health challenges parenting students face.
- Watch the recording of that event here.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that emergency aid can be an effective tool but more evidence is needed to understand how well they may be serving parenting students. In conjunction with the Hope Center’s fall report on emergency aid we will conduct a special analysis about parenting students and their experiences with emergency aid.
- To stay informed about this upcoming research, you may sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter or come back to this page which will be updated when we have new information.
The Hope Center conducted a special analysis of parenting students’ basic needs insecurity by race and ethnicity and dissected the structural barriers that perpetuate harm and hinder their success.
*Results to questions about the spring 2020 term are limited to students who were enrolled in that term. A parenting student is a parent, primary caregiver, or guardian (legal or informal) of any children in or outside their household.