Colleges miss deadline to offer priority registration
State officials hope new law will soon be able to better assist student parents
It was well past 8 a.m. by the time Elisa Arquieta finished dropping off her daughter at middle school and her younger two children at her university's child care center. Only after dropping them off did she realize it was also well past the opening of fall class registration for her and the rest of her Cal State Long Beach classmates.
Arquieta eventually logged on to her student portal to find the final two classes required for her degree completely booked. As a fourth-year student and with no other choice but to waitlist the courses, Arquieta became nervous, wondering how this would affect her graduation date.
“I was just like, `Ah, but I kind of need these,'” Arquieta said.
Student parents like Arquieta have long been an underserved population in higher education despite more than 200,000 college students in California having dependents. Nationally, 1 in 5 college students have dependents.
To address their needs, Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Menlo Park Democrat, authored Assembly Bill 2881, which was signed into law in September 2022. The law stipulates that all campuses across California's three public higher education systems provide priority registration for student parents by July 1, 2023, and maintain a website listing resources for them by Feb. 1, 2023.
“This bill would remove barriers that inhibit academic success and degree attainment for student parents, bring greater attention to their needs, and in doing so, uplift their children as well,” Berman said via email.
Although the law took effect this year, most California student parents will have to wait for priority registration. While all 10 University of California campuses offered priority registration for student parents before this fall, both the California State University and California Community College systems failed to meet the deadline.
However, advocates and campus coordinators are optimistic the law will formalize and ease data collection, allowing schools to better serve these students' needs. All three public systems lacked a comprehensive method of regular data collection on student parents and their needs on each campus before the law.
The law will now require campuses to collect that data.
“It kind of indirectly addresses that invisibility issue or awareness,” said Afet Dundar, senior research director at the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C. “So that's the good part in terms of the resources and website.”
Data collected by campuses can help them better assist student parents by connecting them to government programs like CalWORKS, Cooperative Agencies Resources for Education and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, designed to provide financial assistance and other resources.
All campuses in the UC and California Community Colleges systems successfully
created or updated a website of resources for student parents to comply with the law. With the exception of CSU Bakersfield, CSU Los Angeles, CSU Maritime Academy and San Francisco State University, all other CSU campuses also created the resource pages for this fall.
In 2018, 145,061 student parents were enrolled at community colleges, while 24,023 were enrolled in the CSU system and 2,975 were enrolled in the UC system.
Research on the racial demographics of student parents entering community college in 2016 in California found 48% of student parents were Latino, 25% were white, 13% were Black and 14% were Asian or “other,” according to a report from UC Davis. The same report found 77% of the state's student parents were female.
Women of color are the majority of the student parent population and about one-third are student-fathers, according to Dundar.
Pregnant or parenting students face a unique set of barriers in higher education: affordability, child care, family-friendly housing and transportation. These barriers result in 52% of student parents nationwide leaving school without their degree despite investing as much as six years in their undergraduate education, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
“We're talking about nontraditional students here and trying to fit them into a traditional four-year university mold is really difficult,” said Liz Reed, CSU systemwide assistant director of enrollment management technology.
Katie Dyer works part time as an office manager at a hydrogeology firm, parenting 10- and 12-yearold kids while double majoring in philosophy of religion and women and gender sexuality studies at Fresno State.
Like many student parents, Dyer's higher education journey began at her local community college. In 2018 Dyer began taking night classes at Fresno City College, saying she “wanted more and better — and that was not going to happen without an education.”
Around 44% of student parents nationally are balancing a full-time job with their parental and educational responsibilities, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Over the course of her undergraduate education, Dyer navigated a divorce, child care during a pandemic and homeschooling.
“Every semester there is a point where I feel like I'm gonna completely fall apart every single time and it's just because there's a lot,” Dyer said. “I think the important part for me with being a student who has kids is that you include your kids in what you're doing. We talk about what they're learning, we talk about what I'm learning, we do our homework together.”
Dyer, like many other student parents, attributes her motivation to attain her bachelor's degree to her children.
“They know I'm graduating in May and they're so excited about it,” Dyer said. “You know that you can't fail and you can't stop because you've got these two little cheerleaders just standing there ready to celebrate everything with you.”
For Arquieta, part of her stress turned to celebration when she was able to get off the waitlist for her classes, putting her back on track to hit her graduation date.