Sponsors (3)
The bill promises better data and evidence to identify and support parenting students—especially low-income and underserved groups—and to guide childcare and benefit-integration policies, but it raises significant privacy, cost, reporting-burden, and timeline risks that must be managed to avoid misallocation or harm.
Parenting students (students who are parents/caregivers) will have enrollment, retention, completion, financial, and caregiving data tracked so institutions and policymakers can design targeted supports and monitor outcomes.
Low-income parenting students will be more accurately identified through net price, median income, and Pell receipt data, enabling better targeting of financial aid, childcare subsidies, and other supports.
Student-parents from different races/ethnicities and genders will be visible in annual disaggregated data, revealing equity gaps that can guide policies to reduce disparities in access and outcomes.
Students (especially parenting students and their children) face increased privacy and re-identification risks because the bill collects sensitive income, family, and child-disability data and requires release of disaggregated information, creating a need for robust—and potentially costly—data protections.
Colleges and state systems will experience higher administrative and reporting burdens (staff time, IT, compliance) from expanded IPEDS elements and annual disaggregation requirements, increasing institutional costs.
If data collection is uneven across institutions, early analyses may misrepresent parenting student needs and lead to misallocated resources until reporting is standardized and data quality improves.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Requires federal postsecondary data systems to identify parenting students, add standardized data elements, and fund a national study of practices (including campus childcare) that improve their outcomes.
Introduced June 12, 2025 by Deborah K. Ross · Last progress June 12, 2025
Requires the federal education statistical agency to create a common definition of “parenting student” and add standardized data fields to IPEDS and other postsecondary data collections so schools report who is parenting or caregiving and key outcomes (enrollment, retention, completion, costs, income, childcare use, number/age of dependents, transfer status, etc.). Directs the Department of Education to provide technical help to states and institutions, and to carry out a representative study of institutional practices—including campus childcare and linkages to benefit programs—that improve outcomes for student-parents; the study must be publicly released and reported to Congress within two years of enactment.