Michaela Martin was a single mom who needed child care in order to attend community college. Unfortunately, her campus child care center had a two- to three-year waitlist, and her program was only two years. When she tried to engage the college’s administration about her child care concerns, she was told that first the college needed data about how many students had children in need of care. But the college did not collect this data at the time.
After years of effort, first as an Oregon State University transfer student, and now as a law student at the University of LaVerne in California, Michaela has helped ensure that this is about to change for Oregon college students.
The state of Oregon just passed Senate Bill 564, officially entered at Michaela’s request, that will allow students to identify whether they are parents or acting as parents or guardians on forms used annually to collect demographic information at public post-secondary education institutions, including community colleges and public universities. In addition to biological parents, this language was carefully crafted to include custodial grandparents, step-parents, sibling-caregivers, and others who are caring for children during college. The institutions will share the data with the state, and it will then be reported publicly.
This seems like a simple, even minor, change: a couple more questions on a form. But those few questions will make a huge difference in the lives of student parents.
We know that about one in five undergraduate students in the U.S., and about one in three graduate students is a parent, but beyond that, we don’t have very much hard data. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) only provides regional-level data, and there is no other data available to identify or track student parents at the institutional or state level. Regional data for the Western region (which includes Oregon) reflects about the same student parent enrollment levels as national data, according to an Institute for Women’s Policy Research state fact sheet on Oregon student parents.
The only way many colleges have a sense of how many student parents attend is based on FAFSA, the financial aid form students fill out that asks whether they have any dependents. But some students don’t file a FAFSA or report their children as dependents, for a variety of reasons, resulting in an underestimate of the student parent population. Thus, even NCES data may underestimate the number of student parents, and is unlikely to capture many who are “acting as a parent” but are not the biological parents of the children that they care for.
As a research scientist, I know the power that data holds. For student parents, data holds the power to tell colleges who their students are and what they need to succeed. Because many institutions currently don’t know how many student parents attend, they don’t have the information they need to provide critical services like childcare, family housing, or student parent resource centers. As an expert on student parent programs, and the former Director of the National Center for Student Parent Programs, I have been contacted by student parents from across the country who have been told by their colleges that they cannot justify expanded programs and support without the data. Sometimes these students are told by college administrators that if they could come back with data about student parent enrollment at their college, then the administrators might be able to help.
