Dear Colleagues:
In honor of International Women’s Day, I thought I would highlight some resources that support student parents as they go on to postsecondary education. Women make up 71% of all postsecondary student parents. What resources do you find your student parents need to go on? What ways do you find to connect them to those resources as they move on?
Student parents are a large and growing population. Based on data from the Department of Education (DOE), the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) reports that over one in four undergraduate students (26 percent) are currently raising dependent children. Between 1995 and 2011, the overall population of student parents increased by nearly 50 percent. The vast majority of student parents are mothers (From article about Bridging the Gap Between Student Parents and Public Benefits)
Public Benefits and Community Colleges (Price, Long, Singer Quast, McMaken, & Kioukis, 2014). This final evaluation provides examples of how five colleges have supported access to public benefits and the positive results for their students: Student parent supports can be built in numerous ways, depending on the resources available on campus and in the community. Some leaders of the most established programs say they started with small initiatives and expanded their programs and financing over time.
From the LINCS Resource Collection:
Increasing Opportunities for Low-Income Women and Student Parents in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math at Community Colleges (Costello, 2012). From the LINCS review: This resource is a very strong example of linking research to practice. It can be very useful to multiple stakeholder groups. It presents the problem (women are underrepresented in STEM fields), reviews the existing literature surrounding the problem, offers possible solutions, and then highlights promising practices in the field of the practices in action.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research Fact Sheet on Student Parents: Two-page infographic
Prepping Colleges for Parents: Strategies for Supporting Student Parent Success in Postsecondary Education (Schumacher, 2013). This publication also provides examples of specific programs, with links to specific program in the Appendix.
Cynthia Zafft, Postsecondary Completion Moderator