A federal program helped student-parents thrive. Now it’s on life support

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — When Cai-Lonni Haywood left the Navy, she wanted to go back to school to become a nurse. She tried a for-profit college, but it shut down suddenly. So she started attending community college in her hometown of New Haven, Connecticut.

Soon something more important came up: a son, Landin. Once Haywood, now 31, gave birth, she needed child care to attend class. When she couldn’t find any that she could afford, she dropped out.

It’s a story as common as it is little known across American higher education. More than 1 in 5 American undergraduates is a parent. For many of them, kids come first and school falls by the wayside.

Colleges and policymakers alike need students with children to finish their degrees and fill jobs, including jobs in high-demand fields such as nursing. Providing more on-campus child care is one way to help them do that, but despite a growing recognition of the challenges faced by students with children, the opposite is happening.

The number of colleges offering on-campus child care fell by 24 percent between 2012 and 2021, according to the left-leaning think tank New America. Now, the Trump administration’s budget proposal calls for eliminating the only federal program that specifically helps student-parents with child care.

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“We’ve seen many parenting students stop out of their degrees because they did not have consistent, adequate, accessible, high-quality child care,” said Brittani Williams, director of advocacy, policy and research at the nonprofit Generation Hope, who was a student-parent herself. “Even from my own personal experience, the ability to have child care was absolutely a centering pillar” for students to be able to complete degrees.

The federal program is called CCAMPIS. Pronounced “see-campus,” it stands for Child Care Access Means Parents in School.

Created in 1998, CCAMPIS provides grants to colleges to create on-campus child care centers, subsidize access for low-income students and partner with nearby child care facilities. Students who take part in CCAMPIS have higher persistence rates than students overall, according to the federal government’s own research.

CCAMPIS support allowed Haywood to go back to college. She started attending her current institution, Southern Connecticut State University, because she heard about the drop-in child care center the institution had opened with the help of a CCAMPIS grant in 2023.

Related: See which colleges and universities offer child care

The $159,000 the university gets annually from CCAMPIS not only helped launch the child care center, its director said; it subsidizes access for lower-income students like Haywood, who is now working toward becoming a social worker. She pays only about $1 a day and can drop her son off for three-and-a-half-hour blocks when she has class or other commitments.

“I am two semesters away from graduating, which I never thought I would be able to do having a baby and deciding I wanted to go back to school,” she said. “If Southern didn’t have this child care program, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

Now, as with many federal government initiatives, the fate of CCAMPIS is uncertain. President Donald Trump’s administration has effectively halved the number of employees at the Department of Education, which oversees the program, and issued an executive order to dismantle the agency. The department didn’t respond to questions for this story.

The number of institutions receiving CCAMPIS money declined from 327 in 2021 to 264 in 2023, federal data show. They received an average of $317,108.

Many colleges have CCAMPIS waitlists, and higher education advocates had been hoping that funding for the program would be increased from $75 million a year to $500 million. But in the current environment, they’re not optimistic. For now, they say, they hope to simply prevent its outright elimination.

“You play the long game in federal policy,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy manager at New America. “Protecting the program’s existence is likely to be where we’re at in the near future.”

Related: Parents are quitting jobs, passing on raises — to qualify for child care

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have taken an interest in the program. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, and Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Massachusetts, introduced a bill last fall that would have increased funding for CCAMPIS to $500 million and raised the maximum grant award to $2 million. Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, had similarly introduced a bill that would add flexibility to the program.

“Not only is there bipartisan support in funding the program, but also in actually changing it to make it better,” said Richard Davis Jr., a policy analyst at New America.

This support from both the left and right gives advocates some optimism that CCAMPIS will survive the administration’s spending cuts.

“We would hope that Congress protects this program and funds this program so that student-parents can have the support they need,” said Justin Nalley, a senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which focuses on Black Americans.

Helping adult students get degrees is increasingly a focus of politicians and colleges.

Parents who use their degrees to get better jobs pay more in taxes and are less likely to need government assistance, research shows. Many states now have educational attainment goals that parenting students who graduate can help them meet.

Many universities are facing enrollment challenges among traditional-aged students, brought on by demographic changes and questions about the return on the investment in tuition. In response, they’re looking to bring in more adult students.

But older students are more likely to have kids in tow. 

Related: As colleges lose enrollment, some turn to one market that’s growing: Hispanic students

“Schools are recognizing the need to serve and recruit and retain and support this new learner,” said Jody Gordon, a consultant at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers who works with colleges on enrollment.

Some states are focusing more on student-parents. New laws in California require public colleges to collect data on these students, give them priority registration and consider child care expenses in financial aid calculations. Illinois and Texas have passed bills requiring the collection of data about and provision of resources to students with children.

“A lot of students are not just a student anymore,” said AJ Johnson, policy director at California Competes. “We need this type of information to start to innovate and design for our modern students and their needs, which include parenting and working.”

But making child care affordable and accessible is still one of the most critical ways to help student-parents finish their degrees. Students who take part in CCAMPIS have higher persistence rates than students overall, according to the federal government’s own research.

On-campus child care for student-parents offers a payback to taxpayers, even if it’s expensive to provide, a study by the Urban Institute found. Researchers concluded that a subsidized program in Virginia would lead to 8,700 more graduates through 2035 and offer a 24 percent return on every dollar spent. That’s before looking at benefits down the line, such as making it more likely that the children of student-parents will pursue a higher education themselves once they’ve grown up.

Related: Universities and colleges that need to fill seats start offering a helping hand to student-parents

“The fact that it paid for itself at all was honestly a little bit surprising because child care can be so costly,” said Theresa Anderson, a research associate at the Urban Institute and coauthor of the analysis. “But that’s because it’s really effective and important.”

At Southern Connecticut State, the existing CCAMPIS grant expires at the end of September. The center is helping about 66 parenting students this semester, and serves infants up to 12-year-olds.

“We realized that we were always supporting parenting students, but the level of our support just was not enough,” said Michele Vancour, who directs the center. Opening the center “was a great opportunity for us to demonstrate that there was a significant need and to find ways to make this part of the fabric of who we are.”

The university is looking for ways to maintain services after the grant expires, Vancour said. She said she speaks regularly with administrators at other institutions that are part of CCAMPIS.

“The uncertainty, not knowing what to expect next, has been the most stressful for people,” she said.

Haywood said she wishes she could use the university’s child care center even more than she does now. After working jobs at Lowe’s and Stop & Shop, she plans to finish her social work degree and then pursue a master’s degree. By the time she starts, Landin will be 5, and old enough to attend evening sessions at the drop-in center where he’s already a regular.

“It’s been a year here now and he doesn’t even say bye to me,” she said. “He just walks in and goes and lives his best life.”

Contact editor Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.

This story about student-parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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