A cliché that never seems to get old for Mother’s Day cards is lauding women for their superhuman strength. Typically, the card has a caricature of a lady in a cape, with bold and vivid lettering splayed across: “Mom, you are my favourite superwoman!”
Despite their heroic qualities, the reality of having a full-time career has sometimes made it unthinkable for many mothers to take on another identity: college student.
Single mothers especially, who face considerably more hurdles, are finding themselves overlooked in the traditional university environment. According to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), only 28 percent of single mother students in the United States attain a degree within six years of enrolling. Another 55 percent drop out before earning a college credential.
“The combination of raising a family on their own, going to class, completing coursework, and holding a job can place serious constraints on single mothers’ time that can force them to make hard choices about their pursuit of higher education”, says the 2018 report.
Cloak of invisibility
University is typically catered to those who fit three categories: young, single, and carefree. Topics like childcare facilities, family accommodation, or flexible timetabling can be footnotes during orientation.
As a result, students with caregiving responsibilities like single mothers become “invisible” because of the way in which universities normally operate, says Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau, Professor in Education, Work and Inequalities and Education Research Lead from Anglia Ruskin University in the UK.
“Being a single mother in education doesn’t necessarily mean you should struggle, but I think you are trying to fit in a culture which is geared towards those who are child-free,” adds Professor Moreau.
This sentiment resonates with former teen mother Nicole Lyn Lewis, who tells QS-GEN it was isolating when she attended university with her 3-month-old daughter in tow.“Many people think about their college experience, they think about how many days and nights they spent in the library on campus, studying with friends or pulling an all-nighter,” she says.
“I probably went to the library on campus about three or four times in my whole college experience, because there were no family-friendly spaces or areas where I could go.” Lewis is now the founder and Chief Executive of non-profit organisation, Generation Hope, which provides emotional and financial support for young parents pursuing higher education.
She notes many institutions lack facilities for young mothers, such as lactation rooms.“I used to pop in the bathroom, which is the worst thing.”
Lewis also recalls feeling lost on her first day. “I was locked into an orientation group with transfer students because as a freshman who was living off-campus with a child, they didn’t know where to put me. They didn’t know what to do with me.”
In a report by Professor Moreau and Charlotte Kerner, where student parents were interviewed about their university experience, it was highlighted that having an on-site nursery was highly valued. However, there was a lack of such provision in some universities, and even if campuses did have nurseries, they were oversubscribed or had long waiting lists.
“Even where students are given priority access, a place is not always guaranteed. By the time they receive confirmation of a place or of their timetable, places may already have been allocated to staff or to members of the local community,” says the report, Supporting Student Parents in Higher Education: A policy analysis.
Lewis highlights the mindset of the community can also be unwelcoming towards mothers studying in university.
“I would tell some professors that I had a baby and sometimes the reactions were punitive rather than supportive … I might find that I’m being graded more harshly or there is less desire to work with me when I have a child-care emergency,” she says.
“Just the way that you’re treated, often can be really isolating and challenging and can be enough to make you feel like this isn’t the space. Like, I don’t belong here … People don’t want me here. And I think that can contribute to making you feel like college isn’t a place for you.”
Caregiving burdens amplified
When the pandemic struck and lockdowns took place across the globe, student mothers were hit with an “aggravated psychological impact with their competing and challenging intersecting roles”, according to Kobi Ajayi’s “Meeting the Mental Health Needs of College Student-Mothers during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States”, published in medicine and healthcare journal, Women.
The mother is doing housework every day, working remotely, [and] she’s now taking care of her children at home,” points out Ajayi, a graduate research assistant at Texas A&M University, during an interview with QS-GEN.
With childcare centres closed, caregiving responsibilities, which are usually unpaid, rested more on mothers. According to a 2021 report by McKinsey & Company, mothers are more than three times as likely as fathers to be responsible for most of the housework and caregiving during the pandemic.
Unsurprisingly, this has caused one in three mothers to consider leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19, the report found. Single mothers especially, who tend to have a weaker support system and lower socioeconomic background, suffer from all these compounding factors.
While the pandemic has provided opportunities such as the flexibility of learning, the repercussions underneath the surface amplify for these students. Therefore, childcare is so vital for single mothers to do well in college, with or without the pandemic, stresses Ajayi. “If you give a mother childcare, she can do almost everything she wants to do,” she says.
“If there’s consistent, quality, affordable childcare, you can be sure that she’s going to bring her A-game.”
Looking forward
One of the first steps universities should take in bettering their system to support single mother students is data collection, says Lewis, the author of Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families.
“The vast majority of higher ed institutions do not track the parenting status of their students. So that means they are really flying blind in terms of what [single mothers’] needs are,” she says. Other key information should be collected as well, such as whether the individual is a first-generation college student or comes from a low-income background, Lewis adds.
“There’s a whole story that you’re missing at your school when you’re not finding out who on this campus is caregiving. How do we make sure that they’re actually completing [school] and achieving their goals?”
Professor Moreau adds universities should also continuously review their institutional policies to see if they are inclusive towards single mother students, rather than negatively affecting them. “We need to listen to the students and [see] what they need, and not to assume that [just] because they’re parents that they’re in the functional, two-parent, middle-class family. Families come in all sorts of forms,” she says.
“We need to stop thinking of individuals as fundamentally care-free and to appreciate that we have lives outside of studies and outside of work.”
University policies that take into consideration students’ caregiving responsibilities can create a more accommodating and welcoming atmosphere for single mothers who are deciding to go to college.
For example, a diverse workforce for student services in which a specialist trained in prenatal health is available could be the very support that single mothers are looking for in a university setting, Ajayi says.
While it is beneficial to have experts available on campus to provide counselling or provide insight on community resources, Lewis says this is not necessarily essential. Single mothers, more importantly, need “cheerleaders” who show up for them throughout their academic journey, she says.
“We need people who believe in these students and believe in them passionately,” urges Lewis. Examples of such people could include a mentor helping a single mother student to network and get a paid internship, a professor making sure information and resources are readily available, or an administrator who wants to change certain policies on campus.
“We are all gatekeepers of some sort of resources in some way,” she says. Finally, by including single mother students in institutional policies, universities could be progressing on their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, says Lewis.
In the US, 31 percent of Black women and 23 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native women in college are single mothers, followed by 17 percent of women from more than one racial background, and 16 percent of Hispanic students, according to the IWPR report.
Ensuring that single mothers are successful in their postsecondary careers “has implications for improving racial and ethnic equity in higher education outcomes”, the report shows. “I’m hoping that more universities will really embrace this work as a way to put those racial equity statements into practice,” adds Lewis.
Key to survival
Even though single mother students are more likely to face more challenges than their peers, it is also just as important to understand mothers do not lack ambition. Ajayi points out several studies have shown student mothers are actually more motivated and tend to have higher GPAs than their non-student mother counterparts.
“This is because they have that thing going on with them: they have their family, they want their children to be proud of them. There is some personal gratification, that sense of fulfilment that you’re not only doing it for yourself.” Lewis agrees, adding, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a parenting college student who doesn’t talk about their children being their motivating factor in completing college.”
Speaking from her own personal experience, Lewis says as a student mother, her university degree was her “key to survival”.
“It was my key to making sure that my daughter had an opportunity to do the things that she needed to do and wanted to do in life,” she says, emphasising that mothers simply want to “provide a better life” for their children. Despite the stereotypes that young parents lack ambition and are not committed to their education, “everything that I see is completely the opposite of that”, says Lewis.
Ensuring single mothers attend and graduate college has a follow-on impact the broader community.
According to another IWPR report in 2019, Investing in Single Mothers’ Higher Education, helping single mothers persist in college and graduate “would benefit their families, their communities, and society as a whole”.
Various economic benefits are also linked to a single mothers’ post-secondary success, including higher tax contributions, and saving billions in public benefit. However, the investment in single mother students’ education also goes deeper than just dollars and cents.
“Until we’re really investing in the education of mothers, we are not realising our full potential as a country, as a world, and as a society,” explains Lewis.
“This work is about making sure that all of us can benefit from the brilliance and the potential that mothers have which has just been limited so much over time.” Kobi further highlights the intergenerational gains of educating single mothers.
“The mother going to school is not only for the mother. It’s for her child, for her children’s children … in the long term it’s for the society,” she says.
“We need women in places where they make key decisions… for women to be in those places, they need education.”