Student Parents Count – and a Growing Number of States are Taking Notice

For the one in five college students raising kids, visibility on campus and in policy has long left gaps in the supports and services that could help them succeed. But a recent wave of legislation across the states signals this may be changing. In spring 2026, Virginia and Maryland became the 7th and 8th states, respectively, in six years to pass a student parent data collection law. Following the success of formalized advocacy efforts in California, more efforts at the state level from Texas to New Jersey are bringing diverse, bipartisan coalitions together around a unifying idea: that supporting the educational aspirations of parents helps whole families and communities thrive.

We sat down with Julie Ajinkya, Principal at HCM Strategists, and Jonathan Feinstein, Texas State Director at Ed Trust, to talk about what's driving this progress in two of those states, what it looks like to build bipartisan coalitions in red and purple political environments, and what funders and student parent champions can learn from their experiences.

How did student parents emerge in your work?

Julie: I'm a parent, and I know firsthand how rewarding and how relentless it can be. I didn't become a parent while I was in school, but the idea of carrying that weight while also managing an intense academic workload - and knowing that institutions could make it so much easier - is what pulled me in. A lot of my work focuses on students who have college credits but no credential, and student parents represent nearly a quarter of that population nationally. They're also, in my experience, among the students who most want to finish. These are exactly the students that higher ed should be trying to serve.

Jonathan: I'm not a parent myself, which actually makes me think a lot about my own blind spots - what I might miss about what it really takes to support someone navigating school and parenthood at the same time. But my own story shows how this issue can impact families multiple generations down the line. My maternal grandmother went back to school for bookkeeping classes when she became a single parent, needing to provide for my father and his brother. Education made that possible for her family - my family. I think about that when I think about why we're seeing more and more people returning to higher education for credentials that are directly tied to how they'll provide for their families.

Professionally, it also came through when we were recruiting students at community colleges to participate in advocacy. Because of who community colleges are built to serve, it wasn't surprising that several of them turned out to be student parents. Getting to know their stories, their barriers, their resilience has deepened how I think about other issues we work on in higher ed.

Why does data collection matter - and why does it take legislation to make it happen?

Julie: Our legislative advocacy grew directly out of a two-year pilot program called CAPS, College Attainment for Parenting Students, which supported student parents at five Virginia community colleges through financial assistance, emergency aid, and dedicated coaching. The number one thing coaches told us, across every campus, was: "we could do so much more if we just knew who the student parents were." They were spending enormous time and energy recruiting, when what they really needed was a way to reach students proactively. When the pilot expanded to all 23 institutions in the state, we knew we needed a better solution to the data problem.

That's the core of it. Without data, student parents remain invisible to the institutions that are supposed to serve them. You can't create family-friendly study spaces if you don't know a significant share of your students are parents. You can't implement flexible scheduling, or emergency aid funds, or even parent-designated parking spaces on campus around a population you can't identify. In some ways, it becomes a self-fulfilling problem: if you don't have family-friendly spaces, you won't see student parents on campus, and then you'll assume there aren't many.

Jonathan: At the institutional level, the difference-maker is senior leadership making a clear commitment that this population is a long-term strategic priority. Without data, that commitment is hard to sustain. You can point to anecdotes and hope for the best, or you can show leaders the actual scale of the population they're serving - or failing to serve. When you can link numbers to institutional mission and goals, things change. Without that, even the most well-intentioned efforts tend to stay small, siloed, and short-lived.

Julie: As for why legislation is necessary: it's not that institutions don't care, but it's a question of priorities. It took a legislative change to make it a requirement rather than a nice-to-have. In Virginia, we were lucky that the state already had strong data infrastructure connecting higher ed institutions, so legislation could build on what existed rather than creating something new. Eventually, that data will be linkable to workforce outcomes, which will help us build on what we know to support more student parents who are trying to build better lives for their families.

Jonathan: Texas took a different path. We passed a law mandating institution-level data collection, which put the onus directly on institutions to get to know their own student body - how many student parents they serve, what their demographics look like, what their outcomes are. The intent was to push institutions to ask hard questions about how much they really knew about the people walking through their doors. But that institution-level change is slow, and unevenly distributed. We're now asking whether we need to revisit the approach to make it more like what Virginia has done - using existing state data systems so that institutions spend less time building data infrastructure and more time acting on what the data tells them.

How has the political context in each of your states shaped the case you make for student parent support?

Jonathan: In Texas, two things have resonated most deeply. The first is an idea of the "modern learner," which Trellis Strategies has done a lot of work on. It's about recognizing that today's students have different needs than the students higher ed was originally designed to serve, and that institutions need to catch up. The second is something that cuts across party lines in Texas: a genuine belief that this state should be a place where you can raise children, pursue an education, and build a better life for your family.

The Dobbs decision also played a role. Regardless of where anyone stands on that decision, it created a political moment where supporting pregnant and parenting students became something lawmakers on both sides felt called to act on. It brought in constituencies - including right-to-life organizations - that we don't usually work with on higher education bills. I think this reflects that the case for student parents isn't really ideological. But the work now is making sure the commitment to this population is durable enough to outlast a specific political moment.

Julie: When we started our advocacy in Virginia, we knew the family values frame had worked in Texas, and we looked for places where it could resonate in our own context. What we didn't fully anticipate was having a legislative champion like Delegate LaVere Bolling, who brought the issue to life in a way no advocacy brief ever could. She was the first Virginia legislator to vote remotely while on maternity leave, and she showed up to one of the bill's readings with her daughter. It wasn't planned, but it was a memorable visual image. The bill passed unanimously.

Have there been moments where you saw this issue really break through for lawmakers, institutions, or skeptics?

Jonathan: I have a very clear memory of a student named Isabel Torres testifying at a committee hearing - not on the data bill specifically, but on community college finance and funding weights for high-need student groups. She talked about her nonlinear path, about becoming a mother while she was pursuing her degree, and about the specific supports from her institution she could point to as the difference between stopping out and completing her degree. When she finished, two committee members went out of their way to thank her from the dias and spoke with her directly after the hearing (see photo below). One even looked close to tears and I think that's because Isabel connected a policy that can feel abstract and distant to something deeply human. Lawmakers come to this work because they want to make an impact on people's lives. Stories like hers remind them of how they can do that.

Julie: The same was true in Virginia. We saw student parents who had gone through the CAPS pilot program come and testify - they described how helpful supports were in their experiences and, because the program changed their lives, they wanted to pay it forward and see the policy change to benefit student parents that come after them. We also heard from a coach at Brightpoint Community College who had been a student parent herself. She could speak to both what she didn't have when she was a student parent and what she was now able to offer the students she worked with. That combination of lived experience and professional commitment was really moving. It also made it clear that when you invest in student parents, the impact doesn't stop with them.

Student parents navigate so many systems at once - higher ed, child care, workforce, financial aid. How has that shaped your thinking about what solutions actually need to look like?

Julie: Student parents are a perfect example of something we've been trying to say about learners for a long time: today's students are whole human beings, not just names on a roster. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. They are touching state agencies and support systems in ways that go far beyond the registrar's office. Once you follow a student parent through their Monday-to-Friday, you find all the other systems they're already navigating. Those become your natural coalition partners, so you're not creating partnerships from scratch. This way, you're aligning systems that are already serving the same person, just not in coordination with each other.

Jonathan: I've come to believe that of all the systems student parents interact with, higher education is actually doing the most to center their success. That might sound like an odd compliment given how much higher ed gets criticized, sometimes rightly, for not prioritizing parents, but I think it says something important about the other systems. Childcare subsidy programs, SNAP employment and training, and local workforce boards were all largely designed around compliance and eligibility, not around long-term outcomes or a culture of care for the people they serve. That's not a criticism of the individuals working in them. It's a structural reality of how these systems were designed.

Higher ed, at its best, has a genuine orientation toward student success that those other systems don't. That gives it a unique advocacy voice and responsibility to show up on behalf of student parents in conversations where those other systems are making decisions. As an example, we've found that the relationships between community college staff and local workforce board staff - who you'd think would be natural partners in supporting the same students - are often surprisingly thin at the level of actually helping an individual person. Building those relationships is slow work, but it's where we could see some of the most important progress happen.

What have you learned from other states as more places consider greater support for student parents?

Julie: It helped enormously to be able to point to states across the political spectrum that had already passed student parent data legislation. This wasn't just a blue state idea or progressive priority. When you can show that this has worked in various different states, it lowers the political risk for champions who want to take this on, but aren't sure they can get it over the finish line. Now that we're moving into implementation, we've also learned that there's no silver bullet. Different institutions need different approaches, and going in without a top-down mandate helped institutions in Virginia see themselves as co-creating the solution.

What's interesting for other states implementing these changes is that figuring out how to get institutions to report data in a consistent, useful way is hard everywhere. Being able to say "we've been through this, here's what we tried, here's what we'd do differently" is itself a form of the cross-state learning that made it easier for lawmakers to get to yes. The knowledge that's being built and shared right now, across states, is genuinely valuable as other states consider their own solutions.

Jonathan: We still have a lot to learn from the California Alliance for Student Parent Success and others, particularly about what it takes to build a coalition that sustains momentum across multiple bills and policy cycles. One area we're actively watching is cost of attendance reform - making sure that when institutions calculate financial need, they're factoring in the real costs of things like child care for student parents. California has done significant work there, and I think it's something Texas could move on. I'm also excited about efforts to create publicly visible, searchable information about what supports are available to student parents across institutions. This can create a kind of healthy competition, where institutions can see what their peers are doing to support this population and feel some pressure to keep up.

If you could fast-forward five years, what does a state that's truly gotten this right look like?

Julie: I want to see student parents not just having barriers removed but being genuinely, actively supported to thrive. Full financial support - tuition, yes, but also real cost-of-living support. Free, quality child care. Flexible credentials. I want us to stop talking about minimizing obstacles and start talking about what it would look like to truly invest in this population, in the same way we invest in other student groups based on their needs. This is about realizing that parenting students are a good bet; when student parents do better, their families and communities also do better.

Jonathan: I want to see a state that is actively promoting higher education as a viable pathway for parents. The student parents I've gotten to know are pursuing credentials with very specific goals in mind: they want a better job, a more stable income, a different future for their kids. They've made a deliberate choice that education is how they get there. A state that's gotten this right makes good on that decision - by welcoming them, welcoming their families, and making clear that institutions of higher education are places where student parents will see themselves and belong. I want that to be true whether you live in a rural community or a major city. In Texas, geography is a big factor. A real win looks like a student parent anywhere in this state being able to access the support they need to finish what they started - for themselves, and for their kids.