Introduction

Rebecca, a mother of four attending a rural community college told us, “I kept dropping classes because I was drowning with all of the responsibilities I had.”¹ Rebecca is not alone. A 2023 New America survey found that almost 60 percent of community college enrollees with young children cited providing care for a child as a reason for stopping out.²

For the more than 1.5 million parenting students enrolled at community and technical colleges in the United States, around half of whom have at least one child under age six, limited child care options can put them at risk of dropping out without completing a credential.³ This jeopardizes students’ investment in their education and federal and state investments in postsecondary success.

Mya, another parenting student enrolled in an associate’s degree program, told us how she ran into a problem as she worked to wrap up her final classes. One required course was only offered at the main campus, rather than the campus where she typically took classes, and at a time when she didn’t have child care. She said, “Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone available to care for my children during that time. At first, I felt overwhelmed and feared I wouldn’t be able to finish my degree.” But an on-campus student-parent coordinator helped her access drop-in child care for that class: “Thanks to the [drop-in care] program, I was able to attend class while my children were cared for nearby. This support made all the difference,” she said.

For students like Mya and Rebecca, access to child care services can mean the difference between completing a degree and stopping out after investing time and money in higher education.

New America wanted to better understand how community colleges are meeting the child care needs of their parenting students and what barriers prevent campuses from doing so. While some research has focused on the declining number of child care centers on campuses,⁴ we found that offering care on campus does not guarantee that child care spots are available or affordable for parenting students. For parenting students who can access it, child care on campus can meet their needs and lead to better retention and graduation outcomes.⁵ However, serving parenting students with child care access requires more than one strategy, and child care on campus alone doesn’t solve the problem.

We launched a research project in partnership with 10 community colleges to look into this issue. We found that on-campus child care centers serve an average of 60 children on these campuses, some of whom are children of faculty, staff, or community members.⁶ With 22 percent of community college undergraduates parenting, half of whom have younger children who are more likely to require full-time care, 60 spots per campus are simply insufficient to meet the needs of parenting students.

Further, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t meet the needs of all families. A 2022 Bipartisan Policy Center survey found that more than half of parents using informal child care, like family or neighbors watching their children, would choose informal child care even with access to convenient and free formal care options.⁷ Some prefer this option for reasons ranging from having their child with caretakers of a shared cultural background to feeling assured their child is with someone they trust. Informal care options are critical for parenting students who need evening or weekend care, when traditional centers are typically not open.

We found colleges meeting parenting students’ child care needs through a combination of full-time, on-campus child care, drop-in child care services, and partnerships with organizations that help families find and afford off-campus care. Some colleges also work hard to ensure their policies allow for flexibility for parenting students and empower faculty to excuse absences related to child care or other parenting emergencies, or to bring a child to class when needed.

Colleges use various strategies to help meet the child care needs of parenting students. While some options, like funding full-time, on-campus care or building out a new child care facility, can be daunting, other strategies, like increased flexibility for parenting students or developing strong relationships with community organizations, can be more feasible.

Inadequate funding streams to support child care are one of the main challenges faced by colleges that provide, or want to provide, child care services to parenting students. Three out of the five colleges we visited were using Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) grants to fund child care access for parenting students.⁸ CCAMPIS is a competitive federal grant administered by the U.S. Department of Education, designed to help colleges fund child care subsidies for low-income students. However, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating the program in the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request,⁹ even though eliminating CCAMPIS would worsen the already dismal funding climate for campus-based child care, threatening essential access to care that keeps parenting students on the path to graduation and gainful employment.

The president’s proposed budget and call to eliminate CCAMPIS claimed that the program duplicated the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal law that authorizes funds to states for the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).¹⁰ CCDBG funds reach only 14 percent of eligible children ages five and under, however, so it’s difficult to imagine how CCAMPIS could duplicate a program that only has enough resources to reach 14 percent of eligible children.¹¹

In the absence of enough CCDBG funds to meet child care needs, some states have taken significant steps to improve child care access through other means. For example, after a grassroots campaign mobilized the business community to advocate for child care investments, Vermont passed Act 76 in 2023, directing state general funds and money from a new payroll tax toward the state’s child care subsidy program.¹² This enabled Vermont to both increase wages for providers and raise the income threshold at which families can qualify for subsidies.

In 2022, New Mexico began drawing on a fund that collects and invests profits from oil and gas revenue in order to provide child care to families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and to invest in early education programs in a myriad of ways.¹³ The state recently announced it will move to offering universal child care in November of 2025.

Solving the child care crisis for parenting students will require solving it for all families in the United States, and most states have not made the kind of commitment to funding a robust child care system that New Mexico and Vermont have. We need a universal right to early education, a system in which all families can access high-quality care.¹⁴ Within a broken child care system, colleges alone can’t solve the workforce, supply, quality, and affordability issues that plague families, providers, and communities. Still, there is reason for hope, and colleges can adopt strategies to better meet the needs of their parenting students. In this report, we outline our research findings and recommend how colleges can support parenting students with their child care needs.