When Ariel Ventura-Lazo’s son was born, he had a lot on his mind. Would he be a good father? Would he be able to support his young family as the bills piled up?
He had tried community college while working full time shortly after graduating from high school, but he didn’t do well and figured college wasn’t for him. Now that he was a father, he realized his job as a cash vault teller wouldn’t pay the bills and that he would need to return to college to build a better life for his family. But managing the competing demands of work, school, and parenting seemed impossible.
Student parents like Ventura-Lazo, often sidelined as a niche population with the attention and investment to match, sit at the frayed seams of the many big challenges philanthropy aims to address — economic mobility, educational equity, and racial justice.
Our nation’s higher-education system has too often failed to support students who don’t fit the traditional mold. Student parents — who are more likely to be students of color — are typically among the first to fall through the cracks. The workplace inequities that became more apparent during the pandemic are also evident in our education system, which was not designed to help these students succeed.
Addressing their needs will be key to tackling many of the most pervasive and complex challenges we have long faced as a country, including rooting out racism in the systems that govern how we work and learn. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that many of the issues that we considered separate threads are actually interwoven — and tackling them together is the only way to achieve lasting and transformative change.
Philanthropy, with its ability to test new ideas, is in a perfect position to help connect these different strands and illuminate the needs of this historically overlooked population.
Student parents have long recognized that a college degree is vital to achieving a better life for themselves and their children. They represent more than one in five college students in the United States and enrolled in college in large numbers before the pandemic. They are students like Naraya Omar, a 29-year-old from Virginia, who told us that a high-school diploma “wasn’t enough income-wise. I wanted my son to see his mom go to college and finish.”
The data backs up her thinking. Single mothers with bachelor’s degrees earn $610,324 more over their lifetimes than those with only a high school diploma. Just a $3,000 increase in a parent’s income can translate into a 17 percent increase in a child’s future earnings. Since student parents disproportionately come from low-income backgrounds, the impact of a college degree can be life changing.
Despite their high motivation, however, student parents are 10 times less likely to graduate than students without children. They earn higher GPAs but face greater time and financial demands, which makes it difficult to navigate a higher education system that wasn’t designed for them. Worse, they often struggle alone, with 40 percent of student parents saying they feel isolated on campus.
All of this hits students of color especially hard. One in three Black undergraduates is a student parent — and nearly half of all Black women in college are raising children. Native American, Pacific Islander, and Latinx students are also disproportionately more likely to have to balance parenting and school. While most student parents are mothers, fathers also struggle to complete their degrees. Nearly three in four Black single fathers leave school without finishing. Adding to their burden, Black student parents have higher student loan debt than any other racial group, another factor forcing them to leave school without a degree.
Expand What Works
Racial equity in the United States will remain elusive if we can’t figure out how to help these students. As we rebuild from the pandemic, we have an opportunity to redesign our higher education system and put their needs front and center. Fortunately, we already know what works — we just need greater philanthropic and government investment to expand these programs.
That starts with funding education programs that make child care a focus of student parent support services. Research shows graduation rates triple for these students when quality child care is readily available. The most effective programs directly address the unique challenges of attending school while parenting. For instance, Everett Community College in Washington State, offers Weekend College for parents, which pairs convenient, weekend-only coursework with services such as drop-in child care.
Helping student parents overcome the many obstacles that get in the way of a degree may also require more comprehensive support. Ventura-Lazo found the help he needed through Generation Hope, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit founded by one of us (Nicole Lynn Lewis), which provides services such as tuition assistance, mentorship, mental health care, child care, and housing and transportation assistance to pregnant and parenting college students. After Ventura-Lazo signed up with the program, which he heard about from a former participant, he decided to take the leap and go back to college full time.
This time around, he knew that if he started to stumble, help was just a text message or phone call away. “I felt like people had my back,” he says. “I felt motivated again.” After earning his associate degree from Northern Virginia Community College, Ventura-Lazo, now 31, is entering his final year at George Mason University, where he is studying business management.
In many cases, just providing a welcoming and supportive community can help student parents feel more attached to their education program. For instance, Family Scholar House in Louisville, Ky., offers peer support for single parents through group activities and monthly workshops on topics such as finances and parenting skills. Morehouse College’s Fathers to the Finish Line program provides a sense of community and specialized assistance to Black student dads.
Philanthropy, for its part, has started to support these and other innovative programs across the country that help student parents graduate. Raise the Barr, founded by Minnesota Vikings linebacker Anthony Barr and his mother Lori Barr, who was a single student parent, gives scholarships and emergency aid funding to single parents in college, while also offering programs that benefit both parent and child, such as family mental health summer programs.
More Funding Needed
But the educational success of parents should be a priority for many more grant makers. That includes providing more funding with fewer strings attached to the leaders of color who know what will work best for their communities.
Student parents have proven that an investment in their success pays off many times over. “We are very tenacious. We’re resourceful. We are persistent. We know how to take no and turn it into yes,” says Waukecha Wilkerson, 37, a student parent from California. Grant makers committed to achieving economic mobility and racial equity need to start saying “yes” more often to these highly motivated but underserved young people.
