This session explores the intersection of childcare, academic persistence, and student wellbeing among student-parents at a fully online university. Presenters will share institutional data, insights from a faculty needs assessment, and a proposed childcare initiative. Participants will co-create solutions and research ideas to better serve parenting students in digital environments. 

Student-parents’ experiences are well documented, so long as they attend university in person.  Much less is known about the experiences of the 44% of student-parents who attend class online, and almost nothing is known about the variety or effectiveness of childcare support programs offered to online student-parents by their universities.  This session will briefly introduce student-parent literature, frame childcare access as a core student wellbeing issue, describe the experiences of student-parents at our online university, and brainstorm with attendees on the most productive ways to research and serve online student-parents. 

College can be challenging enough without the added stress of working and caregiving. The National Bureau of Economic Research identifies personal non-academic barriers—including childcare responsibilities—as one of the primary reasons students fail to complete their degrees (Schaffhauser, 2020). Childcare affordability adds further strain. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) defines affordable childcare as costing no more than 7% of a household’s income, yet U.S. families in 2022 spent between 8.9% and 19.3% of their income on childcare for a single child (Women’s Bureau, 2023). For student-parents, who are disproportionately low-income and often experience food or housing insecurity (Baker-Smith et al., 2020), this financial burden can derail academic progress entirely. 

Recognizing these challenges, many brick-and-mortar universities offer on-site childcare support and government-subsidized programs. Yet despite the growing number of student-parents, there remains a striking lack of robust research on the academic impact of childcare subsidies for these learners. The research gap is even more pronounced when it comes to online student-parents—an estimated 4.9 million students (26% of all U.S. college students) now study exclusively online (Welding, 2024). 

At our university, a fully online, nonprofit institution serving adult learners, student wellbeing is central to our mission of helping learners persist, progress, and succeed despite life’s challenges. Our competency-based model enrolls a high percentage of working parents and caregivers, and our wellbeing strategy is built on proactive, student-centered support systems that address basic needs, mental health, crisis response, and barriers to academic success. Childcare has consistently emerged as a significant and recurring barrier within this framework, and due to the high number of student parents at the university, we are uniquely positioned to address the existing research gap. 

To gain a better understanding of the scope of this challenge, we analyzed course completion data for more than 35,000 students enrolled between October 2022 and April 2024, focusing on marital status and number of dependents. Preliminary findings suggest that unmarried student-parents with multiple dependents are particularly vulnerable to course dropouts, echoing trends seen among on-campus student-parents who lack access to affordable caregiving. In addition to this research data, we fielded the “Needs Assessment Faculty Survey: Lack of Childcare as a Barrier to Academic Success” in late 2023. This survey captured the perspectives of faculty across the university regarding students’ caregiving burdens. Notably, 92% of faculty reported hearing from students that lack of childcare is a barrier to completing their coursework, adding qualitative depth to our institutional findings. 

The combined evidence from existing literature and our institutional data suggests that supporting student parents in a remote environment is crucial as these students face many of the same challenges as their peers in traditional settings—time constraints, financial insecurity, and caregiving responsibilities—without access to the same physical campus resources. Universities serving online learners must take intentional steps to close this gap. 

Together, we hope to catalyze a larger conversation toward advancing wellbeing and academic success for one of higher education’s most resilient, yet often invisible, student populations.  

Interactivity plan:  

Following a brief presentation of our findings and proposed childcare initiative, we will engage participants in a collaborative discussion focused on generating actionable solutions for supporting online student-parents. Participants will choose from a range of discussion prompts, including: 

• Designing research studies to better understand the barriers online student-parents face 

• Brainstorming scalable interventions to support their academic success 

• Exploring models for online student-parent support communities 

• Identifying potential funders or policy partners for childcare initiatives 

• Providing feedback on our university’s proposed childcare subsidy pilot 

We will also invite participants to suggest additional topics of interest, creating space for a responsive and inclusive dialogue. Our goal is to engage in discussion that is invested in both scholarly inquiry and real-world impact for this underserved population. 

Relevance: 

Student-parents make up nearly 20% of all college students (Nation Center for Education Statistics, 2020), and about a quarter of these students are taking college courses online (Welding, 2024). That represents over one million learners navigating the dual responsibilities of caregiving and academics—often without access to university-based support services like childcare. Despite their numbers, online student-parents remain severely underrepresented in research and underserved in practice. 

This session directly supports OLC’s mission to advance quality digital teaching and learning experiences by addressing a core equity issue: ensuring that modern learners—anyone, anywhere, anytime—can thrive despite life’s barriers. Our focus on childcare as a determinant of student wellbeing and academic persistence underscores the need for innovative, data-informed approaches to support this overlooked population. 

Furthermore, this session contributes to OLC’s commitment to disseminating impactful research by highlighting original institutional data and identifying a critical gap in the literature. This conversation is long overdue and essential to advancing equity in online learning. 

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to: 

1. Recognize the academic and wellbeing challenges faced by online student-parents, including time poverty, financial strain, and lack of childcare access. 

2. Assess existing and proposed interventions, including childcare subsidies and support groups, designed to improve persistence for student-parents in digital learning environments. 

3. Propose opportunities to contribute to research or practice that address the needs of parenting students in online education, either through institutional action or scholarly inquiry. 

Alonna Koch

Operations Manager, Student Wellbeing at Western Governors University

Michelle Jungbauer

Evaluation Experience Manager at Western Governors University

Samuel Karpen

Senior Research Scientist at Western Governors University