For young parents pursuing a college degree, access to affordable, reliable child care can mean the difference between graduating and being forced to drop out. Campus child care centers offer vital services to support student parents, but accessing these services—and fully assessing their impact on student parents’ educational outcomes—can be challenging.
Nearly four million U.S. undergraduate students—or 22 percent—are raising children while attending college, according to the most recent data. More than half (53 percent) of student parents are raising a child under age six. But over the last decade, the share of public academic institutions offering child care services has declined by 14 percentage points—from 59 percent in 2004 to 45 percent in 2019. The steepest decline—nearly 17 percentage points—has taken place at community colleges, where the largest share of student parents are enrolled.
IWPR’s recent research brief, “Evaluating the Role of Campus Child Care in Student Parent Success: Challenges and Opportunities for Rigorous Study” makes the case for the importance of building rigorous evidence of the effect of campus child care access on student outcomes. It discusses the factors related to campus child care center operations and institutional data collection that can, at times, undermine the ability to do such studies. The brief also makes several recommendations for assessing and improving the effectiveness of these important programs:
-
Campus child care centers: Establish lottery systems to fill slots when opening new campus child care centers or when opening new classrooms at an existing center;
-
Academic institutions: Regularly collect and analyze data on the parental status of all enrolled students and track the academic outcomes of students served by campus child care centers (as well as those on the wait list) to lend insight into the scope of demand for campus-based services; and
-
States: Require institutions to regularly collect and report on students’ parental status and the age of their children; create opportunities for linking and accessing data across state systems; and direct state funding to the campus child care system to expand services for student parents in need of child care.
Better data collection by campuses and states on student parents would help enable research to understand the impact of supports like campus child care on student parents’ outcomes—improving our ability to design policy and practice that enables student parent families to thrive.
For more information or to read IWPR’s recent research brief, please click here.
To support IWPR’s research into this and other important areas, please click here.
And thank you for your ongoing support of IWPR’s work.
