Introduction and Overview

College students today are often taking classes while working or parenting or both. This is especially true for students aged 24 and older, who make up more than one-third of all undergraduates.¹ Going to college as an older adult is extremely challenging: It is hard to afford, hard to juggle with other responsibilities, and hard to finish. It is hard in part because, in the United States, we have made it difficult for people to access and complete their education and provide a better life for themselves and their families.

The patchwork of federal financial aid, state financial aid, and federal public benefits programs, including those administered through states, should support these students. As one parenting student told us in one of a series of focus groups we held, “We shouldn't have to choose between maintaining and bettering our lives.” But too often students have to make tough choices because these programs are difficult to access.

In fact, because the supports are so complex and full of holes, many older students are never able to access resources, instead settling for going without as long as they can. As another older student told us, “I just had to always try to figure a way to make things work.” Other students are treated poorly when they attempt to access the support available. One student mother said, “the attitudes, the phone calls, the long wait times, looking online, trying to figure it out yourself. There's only so much one can do without support and help from [financial aid] people.” She added “you got to jump through all these hoops” to get support. Still others are managing complex lives and financial insecurity, as summed up by one student who told us about juggling classes while experiencing eviction.

The resources that these programs provide, when they operate effectively, are critical to older students and students with children. This report seeks to shed light on how these programs are functioning by analyzing data and policies across four states—Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas. We analyzed the designs of student financial aid programs to see how many state financial aid resources older students and student parents receive. We chose these states as test cases because they had state representative data in the 2018 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, a survey administered by the U.S. Department of Education, and they were geographically, politically, and demographically diverse. We found that:

• Across the board, students who are 24 and over and student parents are less likely to receive state grant aid than they are to receive a Pell Grant, even when they have financial need that will make it difficult for them to afford to go to college.
• In all four states we examined, even the most financially needy older students are not able to access many of the state aid programs available.
• Even more alarming: In both two-year and four-year colleges in all four states, a substantial share of the most financially needy students receive no grants at all.
• Older students and student parents attending four-year colleges were more likely to receive state aid than those attending community colleges.

In addition to examining financial aid programs, we also looked at states’ public benefit program designs and policies and we conducted focus groups with older students and student parents in each state. This additional analysis provides a view of what it is like to rely on the system meant to support students to and through college, where it is falling short, and why. We found that Colorado, while far from perfect, designed its financial aid and safety net programs to provide the most robust support for adult and parenting students to enroll in and attend its institutions of higher education. Missouri and Texas provided the weakest support. North Carolina fell somewhere in the middle.

We end this report by suggesting several recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders looking to design or reform state financial aid and safety net programs. Within budget constraints, they should adjust eligibility criteria for state aid programs so older students and student parents have the same access to grant programs as students leaving high school. Where states have flexibility in administering federal public benefit programs, they should use that flexibility to ease eligibility criteria and expand access. And they should communicate opportunities and fund supports to help older students and student parents to go to college and access public benefits.