For most college students, a canceled class is a rare treat — an unexpected pocket of free time to sleep in or to catch up on assignments. So when Marcos Garcia, a child development and psychology senior at Cal Poly, learned one May morning that his 9 a.m. basketball class the next day was canceled, he let himself imagine a reprieve. He looked forward to a slower start to the day instead of his usual 6:45 a.m. alarm and 40-minute commute to campus.
However, his hope for rest was replaced by the reality of an 8 a.m. orthodontist appointment – for his son.
“Oh hell no,” Garcia said. “I don’t get to sleep in.”
Students with dependents like Garcia navigate college under different conditions than their non-parenting peers. Their agendas are often shaped not just by coursework, extracurriculars and jobs, but also by the needs and schedules of their young families.
“It’s hard for us as students, but you add dependents to it and it makes it that much more challenging,” Garcia said. “Whether it’s food resources, financial reasons, resources, all this is key.”
To better address their needs, the Cal Poly Students with Dependents Program published its first ever visualization of the group’s demographics on May 29. The effort was supported by Cal Poly’s Institutional Research department and overseen by the Students with Dependents Advisory Board.
Nationwide, some 3.1 million – or 20% – of undergraduates in the United States are raising children or caring for dependents. These students drop out at higher rates than their peers despite typically earning similar or better grades, according to a 2024 report from the American Council on Education.
Parenting students make up less than 1% of Cal Poly’s undergraduate, graduate and postbaccalaureate population, university data shows — a small share that, according to School of Education associate professor Tina Cheuk, makes it more difficult for the campus to provide targeted support.
The university has been collecting demographic data on this minority group “for the last few years” via Cal State Apply and a database that’s managed by the Students with Dependents Program, an analyst from Institutional Research said. Until this year, that raw information was “sitting” in a “data warehouse,” Cheuk said.
“If a student group is not counted, how could any policymaker justify allocating resources to this student group, who clearly have distinct needs (and strengths)?” Cheuk wrote in an email. “It’s considered a form of ‘erasure’. If you’re not counted, you literally do not exist on this campus (at least there are no services tailored to your needs).”
The Students with Dependents Program plans to disaggregate and publish demographics and trends of parenting students data each fall term, according to the program’s student services coordinator and first-ever full-time employee, Courtney Moore. Cheuk used such data to justify the hiring of that full-time role.
To build the infrastructure for this process, Cal Poly received a $60,000 grant from the Urban Institute to participate in its Data-to-Action Campaign, aimed at addressing the needs and providing essential support to students with dependents.
This push for collecting data is part of a California State University system-wide effort. Once this data is collected across its campuses, the CSU aims to automatically add student parents to its early alert systems – already used for groups like Guardian Scholars and Pell Grant recipients – to ensure they receive sufficient support, outreach when struggling and are targeted in re-enrollment campaigns where applicable.
Cheuk describes parenting students as some of the most “creative, resilient, and highly motivated” individuals on campus.
“They just want professors and staff to understand that their life is a little bit more complicated, but they’re still willing to meet the standards that are set in class,” she added. “It’s not that student parents need, need, need, but that if we invest in them, the outcomes are going to be long-term.”
Student Parent Joy, a media and policy research initiative founded and directed by Cheuk, posits that investing in students with dependents can potentially save taxpayer money by supporting on-time graduation, helping to reduce intergenerational income inequality and promoting a cultural shift that values care work — parental or otherwise — as essential to economic and societal wellbeing.
The student parent reality
Just as the new infographic brings Cal Poly’s students with dependents into view, the goal of collecting this data is to reveal areas where greater support may be needed, Moore said.
As the student services coordinator, she collaborates with a range of campus programs — such as the Educational Opportunity Program, Disability Resource Center and Basic Needs Support — to address the varied and compounding challenges student parents face, from food insecurity and housing instability to financial strain and “time poverty,” or not having enough time to maintain physical and mental well-being.
Parenting students have the same 24 hours as their peers – but some of that time is spent raising children. As a result, academic opportunities like office hours or study groups may conflict with parental responsibilities. This is one reason Cal Poly grants student parents priority registration.
The policy stems from Assembly Bill 2881, passed in 2022, which requires California public colleges and universities to offer priority registration to student parents. In effect, the mandate requires regularly identifying these individuals and disaggregating their demographic data, including whether they are first-generation or Pell Grant-eligible, as Cal Poly now does.
The bill’s author, Assemblymember Marc Berman, and the CSU Parent Network committee, co-led by Cheuk, used data on parenting students to justify the support outlined in the bill, as well as additional state legislation aimed toward supporting parenting students like Assembly Bill 2458 and Senate Bill 271.
Even as legislation advances, day-to-day challenges like limited childcare access continue to strain student parents’ time. While Cal Poly offers on-campus daycare through the ASI Children’s Center, it operates during traditional business hours, leaving students with evening classes or unconventional schedules without an on-campus option.
Aerospace engineering junior Jorge Ayala, for example, doesn’t use the Children’s Center since his wife stays home with their son while working full-time remotely. To juggle school, parenting and work responsibilities, Ayala sacrifices sleep.
Ayala doesn’t clearly remember the first few weeks of his son’s life, due to no help from family at the time, a newborn’s constant needs and the pressure of staying on track to graduate. What he does remember is that a professor showed understanding during the “blur” of his son’s infancy, allowing him to miss class or complete assignments from home.
Flexibility for missed classes is never guaranteed, even for student-athletes or those who are sick. Until a parenting student’s advocacy in 2020, caring for a sick dependent wasn’t recognized as an “excusable” reason for absence in university policy.
Now that it is, parenting students still often have to choose between being a dedicated parent and being a dedicated student, or vice versa. Otherwise, it’s often their well-being that’s sacrificed.
Now that Ayala’s son is 15 months old, his days start around 7 a.m., consist of balancing class, childcare and homework, and drag on until sometime between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m, he said.
“If I need to go to office hours, it’s a luxury because I’m taking that time away from [my wife’s] work or her sanity,” Ayala said, referring to the time he takes care of their son so his wife can work or rest.
Time poverty is further compounded by the fact that Cal Poly does not allow parenting students to live on campus – meaning they all must commute. Roughly 60% of undergraduate students with dependents are transfers; oftentimes, these students are transferring from local community colleges around which many have already settled with housing and childcare, Cheuk said.
Off-campus living comes with financial strain too. Renters in San Luis Obispo County need to earn 2.5 times the state minimum wage to afford the average monthly asking rent, according to a report released last month by the California Housing Partnership. The county cited a 2023 study that found that only 5.4% of local households can afford to purchase a median-priced home. That being said, on-campus residents at Cal Poly are experiencing increasingly higher rents as well.
For some student parents, commuting is necessary, time-consuming and expensive. Garcia, for example, drives around 60 miles a day round trip between Paso Robles and Cal Poly – a costly journey in his 13-miles-per-gallon truck. The California Alliance for Student Parent Success —on whose advisory board Cheuk serves — cited Cal Poly intake data from the 2022-2023 academic year showed that “several” students with dependents commuted more than 100 miles to campus from places as far as southern Los Angeles County and northern Alameda County.
Cal Poly once offered on-campus housing for student families. After World War II, the university built family housing for male veterans attending because of the GI Bill, Cheuk said. But that housing eventually disappeared – a shift that Moore noted “just happened to align with readmitting women students and then building newer housing that can hold more students,” referring to when women were readmitted to Cal Poly after being banned for 27 years due to a lack of funds and low female enrollment.
“This is a highly gendered issue,” Cheuk said in a previous article. “When men need family housing, we build it… but when women want to go to school, we don’t provide that for them.”
Neither Moore nor Cheuk could find documentation explaining why Cal Poly discontinued on-campus family housing.
Looking to the future
Based on feedback from students with dependents, Cal Poly has begun adding changing tables to Mott Athletics Center restrooms and high chairs to dining facilities such as 1901 and Vista Grande.
“We are just generally trying to work on creating a more family-friendly campus in any way that we can,” Moore said. “Some of the ways are small… but things that can really send a message of ‘you and your family belong here.’”
Still, barriers remain in filling more gaps of support — many stemming from a historic lack of data. Without it, it’s hard to quantify the scale of student parent needs or advocate for structural changes, Cheuk said.
Despite the sleepless nights, tight budgets, long drives and constant juggling, Garcia will walk across the commencement stage this spring. His son and daughter will be there to see him, just as they’ve been with him every step of the way.
“It means the world to me to be able to show my parents, my children, my wife that anything is possible,” said Garcia, a son of immigrants, who grew up in a poor, “gang-infested” neighborhood. “You can literally have a tarnished upbringing, have a tarnished past and be able to change your life around and do something with it.”
For Moore, commencement is a moment that reflects the perseverance and power of parenting students.
“It’s just like the best thing to see a student parent walking across the graduation stage with their dependent”, said Moore. “It is so cute and beautiful and the kids are like ‘we’re graduating’ because it really is, like they did that together, it was a journey that they worked on as a family and you can’t separate that.”
Garcia and Ayala are stories that serve as a reminder that college doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some, it’s not just lectures and late-night studying — it’s diaper changes, doctor appointments and dinner with the family, all while chasing a degree.
On June 14, when Garcia tossed his cap in the air, it wasn’t just be a personal victory. It was a win for his whole family.