Abstract
Mothers, trying to graduate their way out of poverty, describe controlling state policies and university cultures of exclusion that seem aligned in barring them from social mobility.
Today, one in four U.S. undergraduates is a parent and 70% are mothers, many of them single mothers. They are likely to be paying for college on their own and to be poor or near poor. They are also disproportionately women of color: almost half of all African-American women in college are raising children. In believing that higher education will be life-changing, these low-income parents are right. A college degree is the surest route to intergenerational social mobility. In fact, research by the Institute of Women’s Policy Research concludes that if just one quarter of single mothers completed a degree, it would have a significant impact on national single mother poverty. Nonetheless, poor moms face a minefield of obstacles making their way through college.
Alison, a 28-year-old White single mother living in Oregon, told us about her determination to “get through” and leave poverty behind. But like more than half of low-income mothers in college, she may drop out. In a 2016 interview, Alison said she was doing well, pursuing her degree in criminal justice studies, but her junior year had gotten off to a rocky start, and she was “afraid about what’s coming.” Lilly, her 6-year-old, had to have her tonsils out, and Alison knew how the dominos would fall: “I’d have to take like a week off work, which meant I’d lose my [part-time] job which meant I’d lose my [state-funded] daycare, which meant I’d have to leave school.” This would be the second time Alison would join the ranks of millions of parents who leave college without a degree—some taking a load of debt with them.
For over two decades we have listened to hundreds of low-income moms talk about juggling childcare, work, and school. Focusing on the intersection of these overlapping roles, we conducted life-history interviews with 25 low-income parents attending college. Their accounts uncover how poor parents’ pursuit of social mobility through a college degree is a highly regulated pathway. Mothers, trying to graduate their way out of poverty, describe controlling state policies and a university culture of exclusion that seem aligned in barring them from moving up. In our view, this alignment reflects embedded attitudes about who is viewed as deserving of public investment and higher education—and who is not. Sheila Katz, researching parents’ experiences in college, observes that poor moms raising children represent “one of the few contexts in modern American life in which education is explicitly discouraged.”
Mothers, trying to graduate their way out of poverty, describe controlling state policies and a university culture of exclusion that seem aligned in barring them from moving up.
Sonya agrees. A 29-year-old African-American college student and mother of two young children, Sonya questions whether society actually wants to make room for her family among those who enjoy economic stability. Sonya suspects the roadblocks are designed to maintain an unequal status quo: “I think they want to keep us in our place,” she told us, because, she reasoned, if they “want us to make it,” why is it such a “heavy lift for moms trying to climb the ladder”?
State Policies Keep Poor Moms in Dead-End Jobs
Historically, a national belief that children in the U.S. should have their basic needs met—including maternal care—has upheld reliable, if scanty, public aid. From the Mothers Pensions of the early 1900s to late-century Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), government programs to assist poor families expanded although they were never generous or gentle. In effect, 20th century social policy followed an arc that began with aiding families in poverty and ended with pushing single moms into poverty-wage jobs. Over the decades, stereotypes of “undeserving” unmarried mothers and increasingly racist images of aberrant “welfare families” came to permeate the public imagination. Ever-more punitive eligibility rules and program sanctions, including rules like mandatory drug-testing for welfare recipients (though research shows they are less likely than other populations to use drugs) reflected the ideology that poor people—particularly women of color—were not the casualty, but the cause of poverty. To regulate poverty, a society must regulate the “reproductive underclass.” By the late 1990s, a wave of anti-welfare sentiment had swept aside any commitment to providing “relief” for poor mothers and children. The new argument—that welfare was bad for poor families—won the day.
A Northern New Mexico College graduate with her family.
Wheeler Cowperthwaite
Since welfare reform was enacted in 1996, the goal of getting mothers into jobs—any jobs, at any pay—has dominated domestic policy. Best characterized by the Work First policy, this bipartisan consensus idealized employment for poor parents without regard to earnings. Family supports became work supports as low-income parents’ eligibility for aid was scrutinized for proper workforce behavior (meaning getting and keeping low-wage jobs). Long-term family outcomes, with mothers now employed but still too poor to buy family necessities including childcare, were overlooked. As states were held to targets for getting poor parents into jobs or face losing federal funds and parents were held to employment targets or face losing benefits, reducing rates of public assistance became the sole measure of social safety net success.
Part of this shift toward Work First can be tied to low- and poverty-level wage labor pressures: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that most of the fastest growing jobs pay, on average, less than $25,000 per year, including jobs in home health and personal care, food preparation and serving work, and retail sales. These jobs offer few or no benefits, have unpredictable schedules, and are dead-ends—there is no “working your way up.” Because the jobs are so undesirable, these sectors rely on a large pool of hungry women workers, often single mothers, desperate to find and keep work and hold onto meager benefits. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reveals that more than eight times as many women as men work in occupations with poverty-level wages. They have no other work choices, since employment in this ever-expanding bottom-rung labor market (not the pursuit of higher education to exit poverty) is the key activity that makes parents eligible for stable, licensed childcare and other benefits. Reflecting an ideology that permeated welfare regulation, low-wage working mothers who receive work supports are treated as needing close monitoring and ready sanctions.
We found this is also the case for mothers in college.
Alison lives the constant juggle of work, family, and state regulation as she pursues her degree. “If I don’t work enough, I lose childcare [assistance] but I have to fit all my classes in and studying and the job. ‘Just don’t get sick,’ I say that in my head all the time to my child. ‘Just don’t get sick.’ But guess what? Kids get sick.”
Protecting Privilege in the Academy
The history of higher education provides another lens onto inequality in the United States. College was initially designed by privileged White men to ensure the continuity of their status and prestige. That is, as social welfare programs sought to regulate the lives of poor women, higher education was designed to keep women out of the ivory towers and exclude them from the professional and economic power conferred on those who held college degrees. Even wealthy White women were unwelcome until the late 19th century. Higher education has long upheld class and gender exclusivity and contributed to socioeconomic inequality.
The university culture that grew out of this history is one still filled with presumptions about who is most fit to pursue higher education. Despite major shifts in student demographics, with many more nontraditional students entering academe in recent decades, the basic structure of college is still aimed at the “ideal” undergraduate. He is single, unencumbered, housed on campus, economically supported by parents, and entering college directly from high school. Community colleges and state universities try to buck this trend with an explicit commitment to open up higher education to working-class people and non-traditional students. Yet the model of the “ideal” undergraduate, armed with the crucial resources of time and money, prevails.
Low-income mothers, racing between jobs, childcare arrangements, and classes are the antithesis of the “ideal” college student.
Adrianna, a 32-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants, was the first person in her family to go to college, not atypical among low-income student parents. She told us she felt alienated when visiting a college with a child in tow, describing how, as a poor Latina mom, she was “out of order” on the campus. Adrianna asked her family to help care for her two children so she could attend college and escape the trap of low-paid jobs: “There’s no way I would have made it if I hadn’t had my mother and grandmother. They [administrators and professors] don’t expect you to have children.” In an interview in 2016, Adrianna reflected, “Sometimes it feels like a mother has to keep proving she is worthy of being in college.”
Many of the low-income parents we met gave similar accounts of institutional cultures that assumed all students were available to attend classes from 8 to 5, as well as to make required meetings with faculty and advisors, student group project gatherings, and other extracurricular activities. Summer restrictions on course offerings, financial aid, housing, and work-study were also configured around the ideal student model. And perhaps most onerous was the requirement for students in several academic programs to participate in unpaid internships. Some of the low-income parents we met gave up on their chosen career because they could not fulfill this internship requirement and keep their children fed.
Adrianna’s sense that children were intentionally unseen in college culture is evident in some central higher education policies, even those designed for poor and nontraditional students. FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid), for example, does not include childcare costs when calculating student financial need. Yet this cost is the outstanding obstacle among those barriers student mothers say are holding them back from completing a degree.
Uncounted and unseen, the unacknowledged presence of students’ children in higher education has profound, undue policy consequences. IWPR reports that, over a five-year period, “Despite the growing need for student parent supports, campus child care centers have been closing across the country.” Childcare is a vital issue for low-income parents but a marginal one in both higher education and state family policy. According to Catherine Hill, vice president for research at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), “Students say that if they don’t have child care, then the other support services just don’t mean that much.”
At the same time, mothers emphasized in our conversations that even though childcare is an immense challenge, their children are their primary motivation for earning a college degree. Their kids are their North Stars. Every parent we interviewed told us some variant of this simple fact. Sonya said her two small children, “keep me going” when she is exhausted or demoralized. Another first-generation parent said, “I want this to be the culture in my children, we go to college.” And another stated simply, “They are my motivation.” Sonja said the demanding work of juggling a part-time job, a full class load, and attentive parenting was the model of “reaching for success” she wanted her children to see. Still, Sonya sometimes thinks, “maybe that’s how they just wear us out.” Maybe all these hurdles really are there to weed women like her out, denying them the opportunity for a better future.
Sheila Katz writes that poor moms raising children represent “one of the few contexts… in which education is explicitly discouraged.”
Twentyfour Students, Flickr CC
Senate Democrats give a 2014 presentation on why student loan debt is a bigger debt for women than men.
Senate Democrats, Flickr
Barred From Moving Up
When mothers described the welter of obstacles they face and array of authorities to which they had to account, some saw this as more than regulatory snarls and intransigent bureaucracies. Exhaustion coupled with the stress of keeping so “many pots boiling” was everyday life. Running out of money was the air they breathed. Justifying the use of their time—to employers, professors, state agency regulators, and even children’s teachers or care providers—required constant accounting. But beyond these immediate demands, some parents viewed the barriers as part of a long history of keeping low-income people—particularly Black and Brown parents—from ever moving up.
Higher education has long upheld class and gender exclusivity and worked to maintain inequality. The university culture that grew out of this history is one still filled with presumptions about who is most fit to pursue higher education.
We heard parents telling more than personal stories. They were relating a contemporary account of class, race, and gender in which poor mothers, particularly single mothers of color, are impeded from gaining social mobility. They were raising a challenge to leaders in higher education and public policy.
It has long been established that higher education is the surest way to escape lifelong poverty. Earning a college degree leads to a higher income and better health, and it has far-reaching effects for children’s wellbeing and social mobility. Research from IWPR documents that, over the course of a lifetime of work, women with a baccalaureate degree can earn $800,000 more than those with only a high school diploma; community college degree holders can earn at least $400,000 more. Graduating from college means more than doubling lifetime earnings. Furthermore, a college degree is critical to recovery when employment is disrupted. According to the Hechinger Report, after the 2008 recession, college-educated workers were far more likely to become reemployed—95% of those who landed new jobs were graduates. By 2020, more than two-thirds of all jobs will require postsecondary education. Those who do not have degrees will soon find themselves even further behind. Research in 2017 by the National Women’s Law Center shows that women, particularly women of color, are overrepresented in the low-wage labor market at every educational level—except for those who hold a BA and above.
Beyond providing parents with an opportunity to move up, maternal education has a profound impact on children, particularly those children born into the economic bottom fifth of families. Mothers’ education levels affect children’s health, cognitive development, future economic security, and family structure. When mothers attain a college degree, they are better able to provide for their children and offer them a tangible model of effort and achievement. The parents we interviewed know these data as they know their lives. As largely first-generation degree-seekers, these women understood that they were breaking new ground and bringing future generations with them.
We are not arguing that college is for everyone or that it is a guarantee of economic security—particularly if it involves assuming significant debt. But there are millions of low-income parents who are willing to face years of extraordinary effort in order to, as Sonya put it, “try to better my life for me and my child.”
Investing in Parents Who Would Lift Generations
As researchers of family poverty, we gather descriptions of hard lives, carefully documenting and analyzing these accounts so that better policies and practices may follow. The intricate narratives of mothers striving for a college degree provide insight into their world of colliding demands, regulatory mires, and institutional disregard of parenting responsibilities. But we heard another vital account alongside that story of troubles and loss.
Listening to these diverse parents, we heard about astonishing determination, independent thinking, and profound love for children and community. Alongside hardship, there is an untold history of remarkable parents that runs counter to the still-pervasive image of poor, insufficient mothers who must be constantly sanctioned if they are to “behave.” We continue, year after year, to encounter parents who, if given half a chance, would go far—and bring their communities with them.
Importantly, there are now leaders within public higher education and state policy who share this conviction. For example, at Oregon’s Portland State University, Services for Students with Children helps student parents navigate childcare options, coaches first generation students, provides a parent resource center where children are welcome and parents can study, and coordinates two-generation events on campus to keep children highly visible. Another program, Mothers with Children at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania, accepts poor single mothers with up to two children into furnished on-campus housing units and helps with childcare and school enrollment, free on-campus meal plans for children, food pantries, scholarships and grants, family enrichment programming, and counseling as parents navigate unfamiliar academic ground. The program even offers help with the kinds of small emergencies that can capsize a college effort. Such campus-based programs serve only a small fraction of the nation’s student-parents, but they demonstrate that it can be done.
Some state leaders have also taken politically brave steps to actively invest in the potential of student parents. A leading example comes from Maine where, since 1996, the Parents as Scholars program has enabled thousands of low-income mothers to access post-secondary education. More recently, Maine created HOPE (Higher Opportunity for Pathways to Employment), a need-based student financial aid program that can accommodate 500 participants. HOPE combines support for childcare, transportation, and books, as well as college navigators to guide student-parents. There are stirrings in other states too; the spark is often a single mother (or her daughter, son, or sister) who has worked her way into a position of authority while remembering that poverty was once just a college degree away.
Efforts at multiple levels can begin to overcome the impasse that low-income parents encounter in seeking higher education. An alignment of state policy and higher education institutions, coupled with community resources and the unwavering determination of single mothers, can cement the institutional commitment and obligation to move forward, to acknowledge that a sustainable family income built through post-secondary education is the most assured way to build an educated workforce ready for emerging, well-paid jobs; reduce public assistance spending; increase college completion rates; and promote the stability and success of the next generation so deeply tied to parents’ education and mobility.
Michaela, a young mother who recently completed her degree in Communications, knows this. When she entered college, she told us, she wanted to learn about other student parents. First, she approached university and then state offices to find out how many parents were entering the state’s freshman class. No one knew. No one had ever asked. With all the reams of data gathered about incoming students’ financial status, academic backgrounds, gender orientation, dietary restrictions, military service, and other critical identity information, Michaela concluded that being a mom was so trivial as to be ignored. “Forget that,” she said. “I made it my cause to pass a law that requires they ask… otherwise, we stay invisible.”