More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate

Seven in 10 U.S. employers report difficulty finding the talent they need. The workers they’re looking for exist — they are sitting in classrooms, or they were, until the system pushed them out. Nearly one in five college students, roughly three million people, are raising children while pursuing a degree, and most of them never finish. Just 18% of student parents earn a degree within six years. In other words, four in five have taken on all the debt of college with none of the economic benefits. Across the country, 12 million parents have some college and no degree, and millions more are enrolled in job training programs without access to reliable child care. This is a problem that impacts more than just these families. When millions of capable, motivated people are pushed out before they can contribute their full potential, employers lose workers they cannot find, communities lose the tax base they need, and the broader economy loses resilience it cannot afford to surrender. We are not doing student parents a favor by fixing this. We are doing ourselves one. The stakes of that calculation are only rising. As automation and artificial intelligence continue to reshape labor markets, workers will increasingly need to return to education not once but multiple times, retraining and credentialing as the economy shifts beneath them. An infrastructure that cannot support parents the first time they seek a credential will be wholly unequipped to support them when they need to come back. The bad news is that there is no single, simple fix. The good news is that we know where to start, by acknowledging that student parents exist and redesigning policy and practice around that reality. Higher education, childcare, and workforce development each face distinct challenges, which makes coordination across them difficult, but that coordination is exactly what student parents require. All three sectors are under pressure right now, confronting funding cuts, enrollment shifts,