Parenting college students face a daunting array of systemic barriers on their paths to higher education, ranging from the prohibitive costs of securing reliable, affordable childcare to the daily struggles of covering basic family needs like stable housing, nutritious food, and consistent transportation. While these obstacles are formidable for undergraduates across the entire postsecondary landscape, a newly published report reveals that they are often magnified in rural communities, where local infrastructure is sparse and institutional resources are stretched thin.
According to the findings released by the Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS), parenting students actually make up a significantly larger share of the student population at rural-serving institutions than they do across higher education as a whole. Utilizing comprehensive data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the researchers discovered that approximately 26 percent of all enrolled students at rural institutions identify as parents. By comparison, student parents account for roughly 18 percent of the student body across all colleges and institutions nationwide.
Despite representing more than a quarter of the student population at these rural campuses, parenting students find themselves confronted with a severe lack of basic institutional support, most notably when it comes to childcare facilities. The TICAS report highlights a stark disparity in on-campus infrastructure: while roughly 52 percent of public, non-rural-serving institutions offer on-campus childcare services to help students balance their academic workloads with family obligations, only 32 percent of public rural-serving institutions are able to provide the same vital resource.
Erika Roberson, a senior policy associate at TICAS and one of the leading voices behind the research, explained that rural-serving institutions grapple with a complex matrix of systemic challenges when attempting to design and implement support systems for student parents. Chief among these hurdles are chronic funding shortfalls dedicated to childcare infrastructure and a pervasive absence of standardized systems for identifying who their student parents actually are.
"The lack of funding and investments makes it difficult for these institutions to be able to offer that service for their parenting students," Roberson noted during a discussion of the findings. She further pointed out that rural-serving institutions frequently lack consistent, institution-wide practices around data collection or federal reporting specifically targeted at student parents, creating an invisible population. "So it’s hard for them to serve students if they don’t know who they are."
Navigating Rural Barriers
The scope of the issue is vast. Nationwide, there are 1,087 designated rural-serving institutions. This critical sector encompasses roughly one-third of all historically Black colleges and universities, as well as nearly 20 percent of high-Hispanic-enrolling institutions. For the thousands of students who attend them, these campuses are far more than local colleges; they represent essential, irreplaceable pathways to economic mobility and long-term financial security. Many of these rural student parents are deeply place-bound, meaning they possess few, if any, alternative postsecondary options within a reasonable geographic radius.
"Parenting students have strong community ties," Roberson observed, detailing the geographic and social realities these learners face. "They also have caregiving responsibilities, so they often don’t have the opportunity to travel and move to a higher education institution. They’re often choosing between maybe one or two that’s within a commutable distance from their home, so that’s likely why they’re making up a greater share of these institutions, because there’s just less options."
To gain a deeper understanding of how these institutions operate on the ground, the researchers conducted 14 in-depth qualitative interviews with rural-serving colleges and universities that have made deliberate efforts to implement targeted programs, services, and resources for parenting students. The institutional sample spanned a diverse cross-section of higher education, including prominent public two-year community colleges such as Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico and Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina. It also featured public four-year universities like Nicholls State University in Louisiana and the University of Mississippi.
Through these interviews and broader data analysis, the study uncovered that rural parenting students experience food insecurity at rates distressfully similar to the wider undergraduate population, with approximately one-quarter reporting regular struggles to afford adequate food for themselves and their families.
Beyond nutrition and childcare, transportation emerged as another devastating barrier to student retention and academic success. The vast majority of the rural institutions interviewed for the study identified geographic isolation and transit deficits as primary obstacles. Rural colleges frequently cited limited local bus stops, transit schedules that fail to align with evening or early morning class times, crippling difficulties in affording rising gasoline prices, and the prohibitive costs of emergency car repairs as constant threats to a student’s academic journey.
"Transportation is a really big barrier for parenting students," Roberson emphasized. She pointed out the compounding effect these logistics have on career ambitions, noting that many student parents are drawn to high-demand, high-wage employment sectors—such as nursing and allied health-care fields—that strictly require in-person participation, clinical rotations, and hands-on laboratory hours.
"If they don’t have reliable transportation, then they can’t get to class, which will have an impact on their ability to persist and complete their degree or credential," she added.
Supporting Student Parents
Despite the severity of these systemic roadblocks, the TICAS qualitative interviews also shed light on innovative, resourceful methods that rural-serving campuses are deploying to assist parenting students. Crucially, many of these successful strategies rely on creative partnerships and operational shifts rather than massive financial investments.
For instance, Butte College in California has established a direct pipeline by bringing representatives from CalFresh directly to campus. This initiative actively assists student parents with navigating complex bureaucratic application processes to secure vital nutritional assistance benefits, saving them time and reducing administrative friction.
Other campuses have focused heavily on cultivating a welcoming institutional culture and a deep sense of belonging for student parents and their dependents. Recognizing that young children often accompany their parents to administrative offices, several colleges have introduced "busy boxes." These portable kits are stocked with educational toys, coloring books, and activities, and are kept on hand in offices like financial aid and academic advising to keep children quietly occupied while parents consult with staff or handle required paperwork. Additionally, a number of institutions have begun hosting family-friendly graduation ceremonies, allowing proud student parents and their children to cross the academic stage together to celebrate a shared family milestone.
Looking beyond campus-level fixes, the TICAS report outlines essential policy changes at the state and federal levels that could fundamentally transform how colleges identify and serve this vulnerable population. Chief among them is the proposed Understanding Student Parent Outcomes Act. This federal legislation aims to establish a universally recognized, standard definition of a parenting student for institutions of higher education, while formally integrating student-parent data collection metrics directly into the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, commonly known as IPEDS.
Roberson argued that implementing consistent, mandatory data collection practices would provide academic leaders, policymakers, and communities with a clear, accurate accounting of who their parenting students are and what specific resources they require to thrive.
"It would be to everyone’s benefit if there was either state or federal legislation that really mandated data collection for student parents," Roberson concluded, reiterating the core takeaway of the research. "Schools can’t serve students if they don’t know who they are."
