To comply with a recent California bill, the CSU is now collecting data on student parents—which will help the university better serve this group.
Photo courtesy of Cal State East Bay, Kelley L Cox/KLC fotos
Even though they represent more than one in five college students in the U.S., student parents have historically not received the targeted focus they require and deserve along their educational journey. Champions across the CSU have been working tirelessly to ensure student parents have the support and resources they need to persist to graduation.
“This is a huge swath of people who are not being served as well as they could be, who are being treated like every other student when they have, in a lot of ways, more barriers,” says Julia Rose, director of basic needs at CSU Channel Islands. “But they also have more wisdom and more life experience than some of their peers, and that is not being engaged because the population has been invisible. … I think about this work as inclusion work. The first step is remembering that this is a population on your campus that you need to consider when you’re planning things and when you’re building things, whether it be a program or a physical facility.”
As part of the CSU Pregnant and Parenting Student Network—a committee sponsored by the Michelson 20MM Foundation that includes campus representatives from Fresno, San Luis Obispo and Sacramento, among others—this group of champions recently threw their support behind California Assembly Bill No. 2881 (AB 2881). Passed in 2022, AB 2881 seeks to improve access to classes and information about basic needs resources for student parents, smoothing their path to graduation. One provision required that the CSU and California Community Colleges, and requested that the University of California, offer priority registration to student parents.
To provide them with priority registration, universities need to identify their enrolled student parents—making the formal collection of data on this student group a beneficial byproduct of the bill. Such data will help universities understand the unique characteristics or challenges of their student parents, such as their personal demographics or first-generation or Pell-eligible status.
“Student parents are a visible population in terms of the sheer numbers, but they’re also invisible because we don’t intentionally collect that data on them,” says Larissa Mercado-López, chair of Fresno State’s Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. “AB 2881 allows us to take advantage of that data to better understand the experiences, the challenges of our students and help them to feel a stronger sense of inclusion.”
“This is an opportunity to make visible this population that’s been so historically invisible—but that has tremendous skills and assets that we could be uplifting—and be purposeful in how we support and include and recognize them,” she continues. “Through their experiences, they enrich our classrooms. They have such deep connections to their education because they’re sacrificing time spent with their children to be in our classroom—so there’s so much intentionality that they bring.”
By the bill’s deadline of July 1, 2023, the CSU was able to implement a mechanism in the online student registration system that allowed students to self-certify their student parent status and receive priority registration for future semesters.
“AB 2881 has presented a wonderful opportunity for the CSU system to collaborate between our Registrar’s Offices and our Basic Needs and Housing constituency groups in order to find and ultimately better support our pregnant and parenting student population,” says Liz Reed, CSU assistant director of Enrollment Management Technology. “We are in full compliance across the system with AB 2881 and are pleased to share that 2.1% of our total student population self-reported that they have at least one dependent under the age of 18 during the fall 2023 semester and received a priority registration date.”
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