Drayton Jackson, a Parent Advisor with Ascend at the Aspen Institute
Drayton Jackson couldn’t go to class one day because his son was sick. He and his wife had been swapping childcare duties as Jackson finished a two-year degree at Olympic College over four years. But when the father of eight woke up to an unwell child, no backup childcare, and a spouse who couldn’t miss work, he stayed home as caregiver. Jackson broke the news to his professor. Again, he saw how higher education was not built for students like him.
“No matter what the situation, that absence was on me,” said Jackson, who today advocates for fellow student parents as a Parent Advisor with Ascend at the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit research organization.
But to Jackson, attendance policies geared to non-parenting students are only the start of the barriers people like him face to get a degree.
According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, about one in five college students, or 22% of all undergraduates, are parents. Of the nearly 3.8 million students who are raising children in college, about 70% are mothers and 30% are fathers. Women of color are the vast majority.
With the Centers for Disease Control reinstating an eviction ban recently, there has been more outcry on the country’s housing crisis. Student parents continue to be more vulnerable to putting a roof over their own and their dependents’ heads compared to non-parent student peers.
A report from the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice found that about 68% of student parents in 2019 reported facing housing insecurity. That was before the pandemic hit. A more recent Hope Center report in March 2021 discovered that parenting students were 15 percentage points more likely than non-parenting students to experience housing instability.
