By Sophia Luna
More than 3 million undergraduate students in the United States are parents. Over half of those student parents are enrolled at community colleges.
For these students, the simultaneous demands of work, school, and caregiving often complicate their ability to finish their studies.
New America’s fall 2023 Community College Enrollment Survey found that 59% of caregiving students named child care as a reason for stopping out, and 55% reported challenges balancing coursework with caregiving needs.
“It’s barriers, not capability, that makes student parents leave schools,” said Stephanie Baker, senior policy manager in New America’s higher education program, during a March 23 webinar hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank.
New America’s recommendations to improve child care for community college student parents
The webinar shared insights from New America’s Student Parent Initiative — a team of researchers that conduct policy analysis and work to improve outcomes for parenting students in higher education.
New America’s research surfaced three challenges in access to child care for student parents:
- High costs of child care
- Gaps in care schedule, including a need for evening, weekend, and drop-in care
- A shortage of local child care
Campus-based child care is an important strategy in addressing these challenges. According to Baker, an October 2021 study on New York’s Monroe Community College found that parents who used the college’s campus child care center were three times more likely to graduate on time than their parenting peers who did not use the center.
EdNC has previously reported that, as of May 2025, 17 of North Carolina’s 58 community colleges provide on-campus early childhood education. These care models include licensed on-campus child care, drop-in care, after-school care, and Head Start programs.
At the same time, Baker said campus-based child care alone will not remove all barriers student parents face.
Published in October 2025, New America’s policy agenda on improving child care access for student parents outlines various strategies to address child care needs.
Federal recommendations include:
- Increase funding and access for the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).
- Increase funding and simplify applications for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) grant program.
- Strengthen data collection on student parents in higher education.
- Strengthen Title IX protections for parenting students.
At the state level, recommendations include:
- Coordinate child care provision in public education at the state or system level.
- Prioritize student parents for CCDF subsidies.
- Offer guidance and licensure flexibility for public colleges and universities.
- Fund or strengthen postsecondary child care grant programs, such as North Carolina’s own Community College Child Care Grant program.
- Fund preschool, pre-K, and after-school programs at colleges.
- Coordinate services with Child Care Resources and Referral (CCR&R) organizations, which help connect families and child care providers with resources they need.
More Coverage of Children’s Health
Forsyth Tech’s local child care partnerships increase availability for students
Forsyth Technical Community College is one of 10 community colleges across the country that partnered with New America to identify successful approaches to providing child care. The findings from the Child Care at Community College Research Project, including Forsyth Tech’s work in North Carolina, informed New America’s policy recommendations
For example, Baker said the successes Forsyth Tech has seen through the college’s strong relationship with their local CCR&R is a core reason for the last state recommendation listed above. North Carolina’s CCR&R system is divided into 14 regional lead agencies, including the one that serves Forsyth Tech.
Leading the work of supporting student parents at Forsyth Tech is Shanta Reddick, director of adult learner success and Forsyth Tech Cares, the college’s student support services hub. Reddick was also a panelist on the New America webinar.
Reddick said the college’s success originated in a relationship with their regional child care resource center through the college’s early childhood lab, an on-campus child care facility that prepares early childhood teachers for the workforce.
Reddick said the lab’s capacity of 15 students, coupled with challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, made it clear that there was an opportunity to provide more support to the college’s student parents.
To connect students with other child care resources, Reddick said she leveraged the existing relationship with the college’s regional CC&R to build a “soft handoff” process. All of the child care requests that Forsyth Tech Cares receives are passed to the regional child care resource center.
Within one to two days of the handoff, students receive a response from the local child care resource center team to help them find affordable and reliable child care. If all affordable centers are full, Reddick said, the CCR&R will send students back to the college to connect them with funding through CCAMPIS, the community college child care grant program, or, previously, pandemic relief funds.
“Even though we don’t have as much funding as we have had in the past, the partnership is still working well … whatever that student parent needs, they are really, really good at helping us get there and locate it,” Reddick said of Forsyth Tech’s CCR&R partnership.
Forsyth Tech also collaborates with KidSpot, a licensed child care provider located five minutes from the college, to provide flexible drop-in care for student parents.
In 2023, the college used funds from NC Reconnect to create an agreement with KidSpot that provides free child care to students and bills the college for services. Reddick said students can fill out a form, ideally within a day of knowing when they need child care, and receive as many as six hours of child care per day depending on their class schedule.
Today, the college is using funding from a New America grant and the college’s foundation to keep the KidSpot partnership going.
Collecting data on student parents is ‘very, very important’
Reddick also emphasized the importance of actually being able to identify student parents at the college, one of New America’s policy agenda items.
Currently, there is no federally legislated requirement for comprehensive, institution-level data on student parents, and North Carolina is not one of the five states that has introduced a requirement for student parent data collection.
The absence of this data, Baker said, makes it difficult for institutions to get a full picture of the depth and breadth of support their unique student parent population might need.
“It’s pretty difficult to address child care needs if you don’t actually know how many student parents are on campus, the ages of their children, and what kind of child care needs they have,” said Baker.
New America identified Forsyth Tech as one institution leading the way in data-driven student support.
Reddick said the college has students who visit the Forsyth Tech Cares hub answer questions to determine if they’re a parent and, if so, how many children they have. From there, the college creates a database of student parents so Reddick can send them relevant information and track whether the supports the college provides are working.
To more systemically identify student parents, Reddick is also pushing to add a question to Forsyth Tech’s enrollment application that would identify student parents. The purpose, she said, is to enable the college to connect with student parents more quickly.
Her recommendation for any college working to increase student support is to first set up a process to collect data on how many student parents they serve.
“I think that is very, very important as far as the first way to be able to know who your student parents are, find them on your campus, and continue to be able to keep up with it as we continue to do the work,” Reddick said.
This article first appeared on EdNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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