August 13, 2021

The Invisible Woman: Student parents and the COVID-19 pandemic by Tina Cheuk

If crises make the invisible visible, then certainly the pandemic has brought to light our national dependence on care work. At the peak of the pandemic, sociologist Jessica Calarco tweeted, “When other countries have safety nets, the US has women.” As schools hastily shifted to distance learning with the onset of COVID-19, parents with school-aged children scrambled to figure out how to support learning at home. But for student parents in Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs), they not only had to manage their own learning but also shoulder that of their children. Without institutional, community, and familial supports, many of these student parents simply exited the educational system altogether (Contreras Mendez & Reichlin Cruse, 2021).

In my team’s research centered on #StudentParentJoy, we found that student parents were already operating under enormous constraints at colleges and universities where policies and practices have ignored their situational contexts (Dolmage, 2017; Harney & Moten, 2013; Kimball et al., 2016). Again and again we heard from the student parents we interviewed that their two identities were in tension at IHEs, making them feel invisible. Too often they shared heartbreaking remarks like the following: “Experiences in my undergraduate career oftentimes forced me to choose between being a ‘good’ parent and a ‘good’ student.”⁠

For those student parents able to continue their education, the pandemic has in some respects played to their strengths, allowing them to operate on their own ‘home’ turf instead of navigating institutional spaces that weren’t built for them. Having lived and survived ‘on the margins’, their inventiveness carried over into this liminal space of online learning for both themselves and their children (Ahmed, 2016). Student parents on my campus organized and formed a Students with Dependents Coalition where they came together online and created vision boards, celebrated holidays, hosted career development workshops, and swapped school and parenting survival tips. Audre Lorde might have had student parents in mind when she observed, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Lorde, 1984). Despite their struggles, this past year student parents were able to collectively support one another despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 public health crisis, distance learning and care work for themselves and their children, coupled with ever-present economic insecurity and growing political and civil resistance to systemic racism.

Lest readers think student parents are a rare flower in a sea of daffodils, let me share some figures. 3.8 million students are raising children while in college, with roughly 70 percent of them being mothers. Forty-two percent of community college students are parents; across four-year state institutions, one in five students has a child (IWPR, 2020). These students with dependents are largely single low-income women of color. Among African American female undergraduates, a staggering 47 percent are raising dependent children while in school, and sixty-five percent of them work while caring for their families and attending college (IWPR, 2020).

As a result of these factors, student parents experience their educational and familial journeys in ways distinctly different from their peers who do not have direct caretaking responsibilities. Unsurprisingly, this population has a lower retention rate and longer timeline toward degree completion as issues such as employment, childcare, healthcare, housing and finances all impact how these students experience IHEs (Reichlin Cruse et al., 2020). At the same time, these student parents may also be the first generation in their family to attend college or be undocumented, compounding their challenges of successfully navigating college (Jack, 2019; Pascarella et al., 2004; Trivette & English, 2017).

The lack of recognition and overt erasure of care work by society in general and IHEs specifically reflects processes of inequity that operate not only at the individual and interpersonal level but also on the organizational and societal plane. As a result, student parents are made to feel less desirable due to micro and macro interactions that reference normative beliefs, cultural hierarchies, and the economic costs related to enrolling and supporting student parents – much of it biased against women who bear the brunt of caretaking responsibilities (Collins, 2019; Correll et al., 2007; England et al., 2020).

Despite the numerous obstacles IHEs place in the path of student parents, some campuses are beginning to address these issues through better data collection efforts and reimagining institutional logics that have served as barriers to helping student parents thrive. For example, Endicott College has produced a Family Friendly Campus Toolkit that administrators can use to learn more about the diverse narratives of student parents and devise ways to create evidence-informed plans to improve conditions and outcomes for these individuals and their families. And at Los Angeles Valley College’s Family Resource Center, their efforts to support student parents include second generational outcomes that attend to whole families when addressing barriers and opportunities.

In the spirit of the adage often attributed to Churchill of “never letting a crisis go to waste,” this moment allows us to reset what the future of learning means for student parents. The pandemic has made their needs painfully clear, giving us the opportunity to reorganize and reprioritize our educational institutions so that students can fully thrive in their many roles and create a successful path toward economic security (Redd et al., 2011). The current policies and practices of how universities support their student parents are simply inadequate to the task, and the disparities in outcomes across racial, gender, and income groups will continue to widen without concerted and strategicefforts to improve policy and practice for student parents.

With so much change afoot, now is the time we can come together to dismantle the mechanisms of inequity and truly support student parents – by moving beyondmere access to childcare resources (Sallee & Cox, 2019) and instead build frameworks that focus on familywell-being. By making visible both who student parents are and the ways they contribute to our collective well-being, IHEs can better reorganize their structures of resources and power to better foster student parents’ sense of belonging and support their long-term success.

Tina Cheuk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is a mother scholar, educator, and advocate focused on empowering and imagining futures that sustain and cultivate the learning, growth, and success of minoritized groups in postsecondary education. For much of her career, she has focused most intently on issues that include the development of culturally and linguistically diverse learners in STEM settings, the struggles, assets and possibilities of teachers of Color across the pipeline, and student activism work that transforms institutions toward more equitable and just learning spaces. Her advocacy work considers how policy and resources — or their lack thereof — contribute to the alienation and erasure of student mothers in higher educational spaces. She earned her B.S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Chicago and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Education Policy from Stanford University.

References

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Collins, C. (2019). Making motherhood work: How women manage careers and caregiving. Princeton University Press.

Contreras Mendez, S., & Reichlin Cruse, L. (2021, March). Busy with purpose: Lessons for Education and Policy Leaders from Returning Student Parents. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/iwpr-issues/student-parent-success-initiative/busy-with-purpose-lessons-for-education-and-policy-leaders-from-returning-student-parents/

Correll, S. J., Benard, S., & Paik, I. (2007). Getting a job: Is there a motherhood penalty?. American Journal of Sociology, 112(5), 1297–1338.

Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.

Endicott College. (2020). Family friendly campus toolkit. https://www.endicott.edu/family-friendly-campus-toolkit

England, P., Levine, A., & Mishel, E. (2020). Progress toward gender equality in the U.S. has slowed or stalled. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(13), 1–8.

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Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). (2020). IWPR analysis of data from the 2015-16 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. https://iwpr.org/publications/parents-college-numbers/

Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Harvard University Press.

Kimball, E. W., Moore, A., Vaccaro, A., Troiano, P. F., & Newman, B. M. (2016). College students with disabilities redefine activism: Self-advocacy, storytelling, and collective action. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 9(3), 245–260. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000031

Lorde, A. (1984). Learning from the 60s. In A. Lorde (Ed.), Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 134–144). Crossing Press.

Los Angeles Valley College. (n.d.). LAVC family resource center. http://lavcfamilyresourcecenter.org/

Pascarella, E. T., Pierson, C. T., Wolniak, G. C., & Terenzini, P. T. (2004). First-generation college students: Additional evidence on college experiences and outcomes. The Journal of Higher Education, 75(3), 249–284.

Redd, Z., Sanchez Karver, T., Murphey, D., Moore, K. A., & Knewstub, D. (2011). Two generations in poverty: Status and trends among parents and children in the United States, 2000-2010. (Child Trends Research Brief, Publication No. 2011–25). Retrieved from: http://www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2011-25DUPGenerationsInPoverty.pdf

Reichlin Cruse, L., Contreras Mendez, S., & Holtzman, T. (2020). “Student Parents in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Heightened Need & the Imperative for Strengthened Support.” IWPR #C492. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research. https://iwpr.org/iwpr-issues/student-parent-success-initiative/student-parents-in-the-covid-19-pandemic-heightened-need-the-imperative-for-strengthened-support-2/

Sallee, M. W., & Cox, R. D. (2019). Thinking beyond childcare: Supporting community college student-parents. American Journal of Education, 125(4), 621–645.

Strayhorn, T. L. (2018). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students. Routledge. Trivette, M. J., & English, D. J. (2017). Finding freedom: Facilitating postsecondary pathways for undocumented students. Educational Policy, 31(6), 85