College Students With Children: Navigating Two Educational Systems Pre- and Post-COVID

• In Event: Navigating the Pandemic: Resilience, Challenges, and Possibilities

Abstract

Family-, social-, and education-policy conversations often do not explicitly acknowledge parents who are college students; this exclusion further marginalizes a vulnerable population of parents and their children. Student-parents predominately enroll in Community Colleges, where resources are oftentimes scarce. From a feminist critical policy analysis and cultural wealth perspective we interrogate how community college student-parents, particularly mothers, navigate two educational systems in pursuit of upward mobility. This is an understudied but important topic: mothers who earn a college degree are less likely to live in poverty and have improved health and social capital. Preliminary findings highlight how social supports, inner dialogues, and tangible structural programs influence the ways in which student-parents straddle multiple spaces throughout their student-parent journeys.

Authors

• Maritza Morales-Gracia, University of California - Irvine

• Kacie Simental