Student Parent Initiative

More than 4 million postsecondary students are parents. While student parents are highly motivated and just as academically capable as their nonparenting peers, they are less likely to graduate from college and take longer to complete. Higher non-tuition costs for expenses like child care and housing, lack of support for basic needs, and systems and policies that weren’t built with student parents in mind can all stand as barriers in their postsecondary education journey.

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New America’s student parent team conducts research, policy analysis, and advocacy to improve outcomes for parenting students. Our goal is to advance policy solutions that support student parents in higher education. We work towards this by elevating public awareness of student parents, bringing new organizations and stakeholders into the field, and connecting research, data, and promising practices to advocacy.