Beyond Transfer
There is a month for everything now: National Ice Cream Month, Pet Dental Health Month, National Mentoring Month. Some events get a week; others get only a day. September was National Student Parent Month, and while 30 days of celebration and awareness are valuable, recognition is not the same as support. Or as RJ, a mother and undergraduate transfer student, puts it, “A significant gap remains between acknowledging student parents and actually designing institutions around our lives.”
Earlier this year, Transfer Nation California—a statewide communications effort anchored by Transfer Nation and Sova and funded by the College Futures Foundation—assembled a board of creative, driven and fearless transfer students to help guide our advocacy: the Learner Advisory Board. Three of our members are mothers who recently shared reflections on the powerful and sometimes painful reality of being a student parent. Mother’s Day was an opportunity to share their stories, but it would have been a mistake reducing their experiences and stories to a month, or rather, a day. Neither 24 hours nor 30 days can capture the consideration and support student parents really deserve. However, the takeaways from conversations with our parenting board members can help uncover what is missing from the existing student parent support system: the student piece.
Nearly one in five (18 percent) undergraduate students have dependents while attending college, and more than half (51 percent) of all student parents attend community and technical colleges. It is true that many institutions offer important resources such as family housing, childcare, child-friendly study spaces and student-parent groups. Large-scale assistance like this makes it easier to parent while attending school. The Student Parent Resource Hub, launched by the California Alliance for Student Parent Success, is an online tool that aids current and prospective students in locating and comparing these resources across California’s public colleges and universities. Still, there is the question of what it means to design institutions around the lives of student parents. According to our parenting board members, the answer lies in the truth that the resources offered by institutions do make it easier to parent, but not always easier to be a student.
Our parenting board members share that they need to feel like true students rather than a subsociety. “The system wasn’t necessarily designed with students who have dependents in mind. We get labeled ‘nontraditional,’ like we're outliers, like we’re the exception to a rule,” says Brenda Valdes, a Ph.D. candidate, transfer student and mother of three. Student parents are often excluded from student life: clubs, sports, networking events, internships. Many of these experiences require a presence that does not consider or accommodate more mature age groups or the family obligations and financial pressures student parents may be navigating. The responsibility then falls on student parents to calculate how to adapt to a system that may have given them a separate space to be a parent but has not made room for them to be a student.
And yet, even when student parents accept this responsibility, the outcome is not to their benefit if the institutional structure and culture are not suited for them. During our interview process, one of our board members shared that she attempted to join a soccer team on campus, but as a mother, over the average player age of 21, she felt unwelcome and isolated by the team. Despite soccer practice occurring at a time when she would typically be tending to her parental duties, she still made the effort to be an active participant. In the end, being the outlier led her to leave the team. Even when she took responsibility to adapt and gathered all her confidence to carve out her own space in student life, it was a losing battle against, as Brenda describes it, “a system that wasn’t built for us.”
Digging deeper, our parenting board members reveal that the one place they expect to be able to fully partake in studenthood—the classroom—can also feel rigid. “Academia still often assumes total flexibility,” says RJ. Even with family housing or child-friendly study spaces, the limited virtual options, tight exam windows and lack of understanding of the diverse realities student parents face force student parents to choose, on most days, between being a student and being a parent.
This is different from the ordinary sacrifices college demands. Students might be expected to sacrifice socializing or even relaxation to prioritize learning, but sacrificing child development, familial relations and parental identities is not the same. When the choice is made, if they stand firm on being a parent—unable to attend certain in-person courses or complete exams, for example—they risk their status as a student. Brenda admits that her family is her first concern: “I plan for a sick child, for holidays, for the unexpected things that come up at home, not at school … The choosing, when it happens, isn’t really a personal failure to balance two roles; it’s a structural gap that student parents have to compensate for individually.”
Our board member RJ argues that the assumption of total flexibility should be pointed toward institutions, not students. The pressure placed on student parents is similar to the “transfer penalty” John Fink discussed, where transfer students are met with challenges like additional degree time and blamed for those challenges in turn. Student parents encounter barriers ahead of their education, and the burden is then placed on them to remove those blocks. In addition to asking, “Is our college ready for transfers?” institutions should ask, “Is our college ready for student parents?”
Increased virtual options, flexible exam windows, extracurriculars that cater to student parents and institution members who represent, relate to and respect the realities student parents face are basic necessities of studenthood that parenting students should not have to repeatedly advocate for. RJ adds that “true support means flexibility, expanded online pathways and policies that recognize that many students are simultaneously balancing school, parenting and employment. Right now, the system creates an uneven playing field long before graduation; we need institutions that provide equitable pathways to success for students balancing multiple responsibilities and commitments.”
Existing recognition and support address one side of a student parent. When on-campus childcare ends at 5:30 p.m., and the student-parent group meeting wraps up for the day, and the child-friendly study spaces are closed, and the clock reads 11:59 p.m. on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, and National Student Parent Month has passed, what is left are student parents yearning for more than the parental aid presented as a limited-time luxury built on someone else’s schedule and expectations. Student parents need to be made to feel like students, too, like their school exists for them also, like it is easy for them to be students in and outside the classroom.
Student parents bring a unique combination of leadership, empathy, strategic thinking and resilience to institutions. Our parenting board members report that being parents is what makes them capable of being students—disciplined, open-minded, practical, multitasking. Alma Rodriguez, a Ph.D. candidate, transfer student and mother of two, explains that “being a mom is not a deficit—it is a strength that has given me the skills to succeed in every aspect of my life.”
Consider this a reminder of the power in structuring institutions around the lives of diverse student groups and not a pitch for why student parents are worthy of consideration, because as our board member Brenda said best, “We shouldn’t have to prove we belong here by listing our strengths, but if we’re going to talk about strengths, I want it framed as an asset, not a workaround.”
