How Parenting Students Pay for College: Strategies and Sources of Support

Parenting students — students who have children — make up approximately one in five college students across the country and do as well in school as their peers without children, but are less likely to graduate. Financial difficulties are frequently cited as a reason that parenting students discontinue their education without graduating. Guided by life course theory, we bring together literature on parenthood, family role expectations, and the transition to adulthood with analyses of an original survey conducted at two public, regional universities (N = 2,830) to understand how parenting students pay for college. We examine the financial resources parenting students rely on to attend college, how these differ from those of their peers without children, and how they vary among parenting students. We find that parenting students draw on a unique set of resources to pay for tuition and living expenses, relying less on their families of origin and more on their partners and Pell grants. This mismatch between the resources available to parenting students and the implicit expectations of higher education may help to explain why parenting students are at elevated risk of not graduating, and points to ways higher education can better support economic mobility for this group of highly motivated students.