Colleges Are Starting to Count Student Parents — and the Numbers Raise New Questions

# Why counting student parents matters Most colleges historically haven't been able to say how many of their students are raising children. That's changing. New federal proposals and a wave of state laws are pushing institutions to ask students whether they are parents so colleges can finally identify the population on their own campuses.

Identifying student parents is an essential first step. A college can't design schedules, wraparound services, or targeted supports for a group it can't measure. But a headcount alone leaves important questions unanswered about who those students are and how to help them finish.

# Who student parents are — and why the label is limited

Those facts matter because parental status intersects with many other characteristics that shape a student's needs: whether they are returning adults or first-time students, their childcare responsibilities, work commitments, and household supports. Simply knowing someone is a parent does not reveal those differences.

# What the data say about academic performance and completion

Yet the academic record masks a second problem: student parents graduate at substantially lower rates than comparable peers. That gap appears across national research and within state systems. In short, earning good grades does not guarantee that a student parent will persist to degree completion.

# Policy and institutional responses

ECPI University already reports a higher share of parenting students than the national average: about one in four students at ECPI is a parent compared with the national estimate of one in five. That local visibility lets ECPI and similar institutions examine how student parents perform in specific programs and where they struggle to complete degrees.

# What colleges should track next A headcount should be followed by targeted metrics that show where attrition happens. Useful data include program-level enrollment of parents, credits completed per term, stopout and withdrawal reasons, time-to-degree, and nonacademic indicators such as childcare needs, work hours, and transportation barriers.

Collecting these measures enables colleges to redesign schedules, advising, financial supports, and student services around real constraints. It also prevents misleading conclusions based solely on grades and enrollment counts.

# Bottom line Counting student parents is necessary and overdue. But institutions must use those counts to measure progress and barriers beyond the classroom. When colleges combine demographic visibility with progress and persistence data, they can design programs and policies that align with the realities of students raising families.