Student parents face severe housing and food insecurity, according to a new report from the Hope Center For College, Community, and Justice, a research center focused on college completion.
Of a pool of 23,000 parenting students, over 53% were food insecure in the last month, 68% were housing insecure and 17% were homeless in the previous year. The results were based on student parent respondents in the center’s #RealCollege survey, which included 330,000 students from 411 schools.
These are “really high rates of basic needs insecurity,” said the center’s founding director, Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, one of the authors of the report and a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University. “It’s a whole other thing to face food insecurity yourself while you have a child in your house you also need to feed.”
She emphasized that this isn’t just a social issue but an educational one. The report cites data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research that found only 37% of all student parents complete a degree within six years, compared to 59% of their peers without children.
Meanwhile, she and her colleagues see a connection between student parents’ ability to afford childcare and their academic performance because parents who struggle to pay tend to miss more class.
More than half of parents who found childcare affordable had no childcare-related absences from school or work, compared to 41% of parents who couldn’t afford childcare. A lot of parents fall into that category. More than 62% of parenting students and 70% of single parents reported they couldn’t afford their childcare.
“These are academic issues,” Goldrick-Rab said. “If you can’t afford childcare, you’re less likely to be in class.”
