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, and deepening questions about their relevance and sustainability, but institutions have an opening to redesign these sectors in ways that make them more durable. A college or training program built to serve a parent working the night shift, raising two kids, and carrying debt is one built for the realities of modern American life.
Too often, colleges still design their programs for traditional, residential students with few outside responsibilities. This is a model that no longer reflects who is sitting in the classroom or who needs to be. Institutions can structure programs with working parents in mind by expanding evening, weekend, and online options, building stackable credentials that allow students to keep moving forward when life intervenes, and investing in child care and wraparound supports that improve retention.
Research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that community college student parents with access to on-campus child care were nearly three times more likely to graduate or transfer to a four-year institution within three years, with 41% completing compared to just 15% of those without it.
The investment pays for itself. Housing insecurity compounds the problem further. A 2026 New America and Trellis Strategies survey found that nearly a third of caregiving students who moved multiple times in a single year did so because they could not afford rent, and nearly a quarter because their housing was unsafe, yet 73% did not know they could request additional financial assistance from their institution, and just 3% who asked actually received it. That awareness gap is closeable. The resource gap is addressable. Both require institutions to treat student parents as a design priority rather than an afterthought.
Employers have a role too. Nearly 70% of student parents work while enrolled, yet unpredictable schedules and rigid job requirements make it exceedingly difficult to stay on track academically. Flexible scheduling and paid internships would go a long way toward closing that gap.
Policymakers, meanwhile, control the levers that determine whether all of this remains fragmented or becomes coherent. Funding for child care, financial aid, and workforce development sits in silos, forcing student parents to navigate a maze of requirements that often renders them ineligible for the very programs that should be designed to help them.
Fortunately, policymakers — on both sides of the aisle — have increasingly made support for student parents a purple issue: a rare feat in politically fractious times. States likeGeorgia andOregon have shown what aligned policy can accomplish, linking child care access to postsecondary persistence and reforming subsidy programs to recognize that school and work are not mutually exclusive. A growing number of states, includingMaryland,Virginia, andNew Mexico, are taking the essential first step of collecting data on parenting students so that resources can follow actual needs.
The nurses, teachers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are leaving without degrees today are not the problem. The gap between their ambition and the infrastructure available to support it is. Closing that gap is not generosity; it is smart strategy. Every institution connected to learning and work is being asked to prove its relevance right now, and designing with student parents in mind may be one of the clearest ways to do exactly that.
Enyi Okebugwu is senior program manager at Imaginable Futures, a philanthropic organization that invests in education and economic opportunity for families across the United States and globally.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The post More than 3 million college students are raising kids. Most won’t graduate appeared first on Fortune.
