In the early 1970s, disability activists in Berkeley pushed the city to cut ramps into its curbs so wheelchair users could cross the street. The ramps worked. They also helped parents pushing strollers, travelers dragging luggage, and just about everyone else. Researchers now call it the “curb-cut effect”: design for people at the margins, and you often design better for everyone.
Higher education has plenty of curbs. Most institutions were built for the “traditional student”: 18, living on campus, enrolled full time, with no one depending on him or her. That student is increasingly hard to find.
September is Student Parent Month, which makes it an opportune time to consider the curbs faced by a growing portion of the higher education population: student parents.
Start with the numbers. Roughly one in five college students is raising children while pursuing a degree. Student parents tend to earn GPAs on par with or higher than their peers, yet just 18 percent earn a degree within six years. Complete College America has long argued that time is the enemy of completion, a grim reality for parents juggling work, school, and child care — a state researchers call “time poverty.”
As former Massachusetts Governor and longtime education advocate Jane Swift and EdTrust-West’s Christopher Nellum argued in Governing last week, college is still built around the 18-year-old living on campus with few outside responsibilities, while childcare policy has been built around workers, not students. The good news is that a rare bipartisan consensus around parenting students is emerging, with red and blue states alike expanding childcare access and requiring colleges to support student parents.
Institutions and organizations are also starting to cut curbs on their own. Last week, National University opened its second Nest center inside the Escondido YMCA, offering child care alongside veteran support and other services. The evidence backs that investment: student parents at Monroe Community College with on-campus child care were nearly three times as likely to graduate or transfer within three years.
Others are focused on the human side of persistence. One Million Degrees’ holistic model shows what consistent student support can do. In the Chicago Tribune, OMD’s Rita Raichoudhuri noted that nearly a third of participants in a recent onboarding round chose evening or weekend slots, many of them parents who could only meet after their kids were asleep. Similarly, The College of Health Care Professions designed their academic calendar on the premise that minimizing travel time to campus would improve graduation rates and postgraduate employment outcomes. Class schedules may sound like an in-the-weeds detail, but for some students, it’s the difference between a diploma and debt with nothing to show for it.
Technology is extending that support beyond traditional classroom hours. InsideTrack and its parent organization, LEMNIS, are pairing coaching with technology to reach students when and where they need it. Uwill’s 24/7 digital mental health tools are now available to 16 campuses across the Technical College System of Georgia; at early adopter Gwinnett Tech, roughly 35% of sessions happened outside traditional counseling hours.
Funders are pushing the field to take two generations seriously at once. As Imaginable Futures’ Enyi Okebugwu wrote in Fortune this summer, seven in 10 employers are struggling to find talent, and many of the workers they need are student parents pushed out before they could finish. Supporting them, he argued, “is not generosity; it is smart strategy.”
That’s the lesson of the curb cut: solving for student parents rarely comes at anyone else’s expense. More often, it’s how we build systems that work for everyone.
Next month, I’ll become a parent myself and get my first real taste of the juggling act millions of student parents manage every day, on top of coursework, exams, and countless other commitments. Even the prospect has given me a new appreciation for their persistence.
Student Parent Month ends this week. The work of cutting curbs never stops.
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