Book Review: ‘Pregnant Girl’ Prompts Public Policy Discussion About Parenting Students

Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College and Creating A Better Future for Young Families by Nicole Lynn Lewis is a powerful and deeply moving memoir that sheds light on the plight of an invisible population: student-parents.

In her harrowing narrative, Lewis recounts the heart-wrenching pangs of racism and poverty that she experienced as a young mother working her way through college at William & Mary. And in retelling her story, Lewis — who is the founder of Generation Hope, a nonprofit that works to ensure that all student-parents have opportunities to succeed and experience economic mobility — provides hope to current student-parents and a much-needed blueprint to college administrators on how they can do a better job supporting this growing demographic of students.

But Pregnant Girl is much more than a recollection of Lewis’ personal journey through college and those of others just like her. Instead, it is a sharp critique of all that is wrong with higher education, including rising costs that leave so many saddled with student loans.

“Parenting students, who make up nearly half of all students attending for-profit colleges, institutions that similarly prey on low-income students with a promise of earning credentials quickly and moving into high-paying jobs upon completion are particularly burdened by student debt,” Lewis writes. “The average annual loans of parenting students at for-profit colleges are more than ten times higher than those of parenting students at community colleges.”

In an interview with Diverse, Lewis — who was named a CNN Hero and is the recipient of the prestigious Roslyn S. Jaffe Award — said she wrote the book to center the experiences of parenting students who are often left out of critical conversations about the future of higher education and their place in it.

“We’re not talking about them,” she says. “We’re not making sure that we understand their experiences and their needs. And there’s so much work that has to be done to start putting them on the radar of institutions and policymakers. And I’m hoping that this book does that.”

She notes that too many of higher ed’s current policies and processes regarding student parents are reactionary, “and our lack of support comes from this idea that, you know, young people are fine, they have a pregnancy, and then they spiral out of control.”