Investing in Student Parents Catalyzes Economic Mobility

Millions of parents don’t need an economics degree to see what economists already know: most jobs that offer the pay and stability needed to raise a family require at least some education or training beyond high school. That’s especially true for the high-growth, good-paying jobs predicted to need more workers in the coming years.

These facts are what lead many of the 1 in 5 college students who are parents to enroll in the first place — a sizable number that doesn’t include the millions more in short-term job training programs. Student parents are overrepresented in health care fields, where the demand for skilled workers is high and growing. Yet, most never complete the degree they dedicated their limited time and money to pursuing.

We’ve seen how student parents must move mountains every day just to get to class — and those mountains are policies that fail to recognize their experience as both parents and students.

If we want to catalyze economic mobility that lasts across generations, then we must ensure that parents have access to the benefits of postsecondary education.

Imaginable Futures and the Annie E. Casey Foundation recently co-hosted a webinar with the Asset Funders Network to dig into the intersection of student parent success and economic mobility. Watch the recording and read below for how funders can incorporate student parents into their grantmaking strategies.

Postsecondary Education Is an Income-Generating Asset for Families

The stakes of student parent success are high: completing a degree can double lifetime earnings for parents, cutting poverty rates for single mothers, in particular, by half. This matters because even a slight increase in parents’ earnings has been shown to increase their child’s future earnings. In this way, education is like an asset that can be passed down from generation to generation.

Student parents are highly motivated: They know exactly what a degree means for their families’ futures. They also are talented, earning comparable grades as non-parents despite far higher demands on their time and resources. Those demands — combined with limited access to supports like child care and housing — prove to be insurmountable barriers to completion more often than not.

High stop-out rates for parents – 80% higher than for non-parents – mean that millions of families have taken on the debt of a college degree and none of the benefits. Although 3 million parents are currently enrolled in college, 12 million more have some college and no degree. In fact, parents are the most common subgroup of U.S. adults to have enrolled in college and not completed.

Whole communities and regional economies also stand to gain from student parent success, not only in opening a large pool of potential skilled talent to the workforce, but in reducing public assistance spending to the tune of $20 billion.

Leveraging the Intersections: Grantmaking for Two-Generation Solutions

One way to effectively invest in student parent success is by developing a grantmaking strategy specifically focused on improving the well-being of parenting students. But it’s not the only way.

Here are examples from our work of different approaches for investing in student parent success:

• Imaginable Futures is a global education funder, with a U.S. focus on ensuring young children and their parents get the education they need to thrive. Its systems change approach identifies leverage points, connections, and gaps where greater investment could unlock opportunity for more learners. When we looked across the system, two areas emerged: closing the gap between the value of early learning and society’s investment in youngest learners, and improving parents’ economic success to ensure better results for their children. Student parents tie these threads together.
• The Casey Foundation has long invested in student parent success as part of broader strategies focused on family and youth opportunity and two-generation solutions. We focus on supporting young parents to balance caregiving, coursework, and employment while completing credentials that lead to good jobs and family-sustaining wages. Because most student parents attend community colleges — which offer lower costs, flexible schedules, and strong support for first-generation and low-income students — the Foundation prioritizes investments there. Our September 2025 brief, Supporting Young Parents in Higher Education, provides insights from a pilot program implemented by community partnerships at community colleges to support parenting students between the ages of 18-24.

Inclusive Grantmaking that Unlocks Greater Opportunity

For other funders, supporting the postsecondary success of parents does not have to require overhauling a grantmaking strategy. By making existing strategies more inclusive of the parenting student experience, funders may discover new, effective solutions to systemic challenges in education and beyond. Research from the Urban Institute found that student parents sit at the intersection of more than 80 policies across 11 policy realms. Child care, housing, workforce, financial security, health care, transportation, and education are all student parent issues.

A few questions funders can ask to ensure their strategy is student-parent-inclusive:

• If you focus on a specific community or population, are parents seeking to improve their education, training, or workforce skills showing up in your work? If so, are they facing unique challenges that programs could better address? 
• If you focus on economic mobility or workforce development, does a focus on working families include parents pursuing education or training too? What would it mean to make this more explicit?
• If you focus on access to housing, transportation, child care, or financial inclusion, how could applying a focus on student parents strengthen potential solutions?

No one funder can address gaps between 80+ policies. But funders with specialties in particular areas can play a catalytic role in supporting student parent success. By investing in ways that spark broader systems change, funders can unlock opportunities beyond a single program or grant — especially by collaborating with across silos. We invite funders to connect with us and explore collaborative solutions.

A Unifying Investment with Impact

Supporting the success of student parents is an issue that unites people across different perspectives and geographic boundaries. The US Senate has voted to declare September as National Student Parent Month for each of the last five years. In 2025, bipartisan legislation to improve student parent success was introduced in the House of Representatives.

New support for student parents has also passed in states ranging from  California and Texas. In less than five years, the number of states passing new laws to support parenting students grew from none to five. 

Systems change is about more than policy — but for funders seeking catalytic impact, supporting student parent success delivers a generational return on investment.