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Key points
- Nearly 11 percent of U.S. undergraduates, or 2.17 million college students nationwide, are single moms.
- A new pilot at four U.S. community colleges is testing innovative programs to support single moms in postsecondary education.
- Research on single moms in college reveals four key areas of need: resources, flexibility, career counseling, and community.
Eleven percent of U.S. college undergraduates are single mothers. To put that in context, there are approximately 500,000 more single moms than there are Asian Americans in college right now. If you glean one fact from the Single Moms Success Design Challenge (SMSDC), a new initiative led by the Education Design Lab, let it be that there are single moms enrolled at your institution, and you probably don’t know who all of them are.
Only 28 percent of these single moms, however, earn any type of postsecondary credential within six years of matriculating, a rate more than two times worse than married mothers and six times worse than women without children. To move toward ending these disparities, the Education Design Lab interviewed more than 100 single moms and 70 community college faculty and staff to identify the biggest challenges facing this population and generate strategies for improving their success. Now four community colleges have begun two-year pilots of holistic support programs for single moms on their campuses.
The most exciting part of these projects is how they set the stage to truly redesign college around single moms, not just help them survive a system that wasn’t built for them in the first place. While we wait for these results, I found it helpful to examine the themes present across these four programs—resources, flexibility, careers, and community—and consider ways in which colleges can better support single moms today. Moreover, learning about these programs led me to reflect on how we could amplify these themes using behavioral science to bolster achievement among these students.
Single Moms Need Resources
Nearly 90 percent of undergraduate single mothers live near or below the poverty line. Not only does financial scarcity threaten persistence, but it also impairs learning by diverting attention away from class and toward money concerns. That is why the first line of defense in these programs is financial support, such as scholarships, emergency aid, transportation assistance, and vouchers for childcare.
As I’ve seen through my work at Persistence Plus, however, making resources available is not enough. Students fail to access these funds for a variety of reasons, including shame or embarrassment, help-seeking threat, and self-reliance. One effective strategy we’ve employed to overcome these obstacles is social norming. Letting students know that others like them avail themselves of support from the college (financial or otherwise) has led to marked increases in students’ use of food pantries, emergency aid, and academic tutoring.
Single Moms Need Flexibility
Along with financial poverty, single moms suffer from time poverty. A 2018 study showed that student parents, in general, spend more than 10 hours more per day on paid and unpaid work than their peers—a figure that is likely higher among single moms. Time poverty not only limits availability for class, studying, and additional supports (e.g., tutoring, advising, office hours) but, like financial poverty, also diverts attention away from learning. While it’s difficult for colleges to alleviate time poverty, they can provide flexibility for single moms who can only continue with school on their own schedule.
The SMSDC colleges are increasing flexibility for single mothers in various ways. Many program offerings are online, not just because of COVID-19 but also to provide attendance options that may not require transportation and childcare. Colleges teach courses in multiple modalities, including some that can be attended in person or online (synchronously or asynchronously) during any given week. Along with reducing absenteeism due to shifting work schedules, sick children, and canceled babysitters, these options can boost single moms’ sense of agency in their education.
Single Moms Need Career Counseling
Single mothers typically have a clear reason to attend college—a better job that provides a better life for their children. And college offers perhaps no better path to improved quality of life, as every additional level of education achieved decreases single moms’ likelihood of living in poverty by 32 percent. This is why all SMSDC programs incorporate career counseling, including coaches or case managers (with flexible options to connect online and at off-hours), career assessment tools, and earn-and-learn opportunities.
But so often I see single moms motivated by more than just their own children’s welfare. These women—the majority of whom live in poverty, belong to oppressed social groups (Black and Native American students are most likely to be single mothers), and face myriad obstacles to their success—tend to gravitate toward careers centered on helping others. Education and messages that focus on interdependence, community, selflessness, and self-transcendence will likely motivate single moms during their most challenging moments more so than a strict focus on dollars and cents.
Single Moms Need Community
Because motherhood can be an invisible identity on campus, it’s important to build a student community of single moms. These colleges have designed online or app-based groups and in-person events so single mothers can network, support one another, and know they’re not alone. One college has even formed a coalition of single moms to inform campus policy.
That same college has also included single mothers as part of their employee diversity, equity, and inclusion training. Fostering a sense of community for single moms begins with faculty and staff, and that often starts with basic awareness of their existence on campus. But awareness must then extend to understanding the unique challenges and strengths of single mothers and how to redesign college classrooms, processes, and resources so more single moms earn a college credential. This is an area of work we’ve focused on this past year, using behavioral science and text messaging to encourage faculty and staff to connect with students on a deeper level and provide the right support at the right time.
Conclusion
Single mothers deserve our admiration and support for just being, let alone working toward a college credential to better their children’s futures. The SMSDC initiative will hopefully reveal insights as to the most effective programs and resources to help more single moms graduate. In the meantime, we can work toward understanding how many single mothers are currently on our college campuses and consider how we provide additional resources, flexibility, advising, and community to enable their success.
