Student Parents in Community Colleges: Building Support Systems to Ensure Education Success

By Adrian Huerta

In 2018, my colleague Cecilia Rios-Aguilar at UCLA started a multi-year research project on student parents in community colleges with support from a seed grant from the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We sought to understand how student parents make sense of their career and educational experiences in a two-year college. We interviewed and surveyed close to 100 student parents in a local community college about their experiences trying to enroll, persist and graduate with a two-year college degree or certificate so that they can transition into their professional lives.

Many student parents commented that they felt invisible in the eyes of college administrators about the multiple demands of their time that did not fully allow them to study, sleep or eat a meal in peace, while others commented that administrators didn’t understand how to best serve them or help them with their educational journey.  

These issues are not new for student parents. Still, the global pandemic illuminated that many student parents must walk alone and with(out) support to feed their families, pay the internet bill or teach their children during virtual classroom sessions. Their cries for help were met by some community colleges with offers of emergency aid or basic needs supplies, but most efforts were a bandage during a moment of triage. What remains is that there is still more room for growth, strategic investment and support for student parents.    

Since the first focus group interviews with student parents in 2019, we have produced a report through a partnership with UC Davis’ Wheelhouse Center and one peer-reviewed paper published in the Community College Review. Collectively, we aim to bring attention to the unique needs of student parents in higher education that require targeted support and investment from college leaders as well as state and federal investment to ensure that student parents graduate from college. There is a recent surge of research, practice and think-tanks exploring the needs of student parents in higher education. All the shared voices reaffirm that this population of students will require much greater efforts to expand college access success. More targeted social and economic resources are needed for the children or dependents of student parents to encompass a multi-generational practice to move families out of poverty and low-wage positions into sustainable and high-paying career tracks.  

Now, thanks to a recent grant from the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation, we’ll focus on continuing this line to work to better understand how colleges are working to meet the unique needs of student parents. At the Pullias Center, we are excited to partner with the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation for their commitment to minoritized and vulnerable student populations in the local community, especially those in two-year institutions who can benefit from immediate policy and practice changes.  As always, we must #FightOn for social and racial equity and change of systematic practices that have historically excluded instead of elevated multiple student populations.