Winter 2004

Volume 33
Number 2

Balancing Act

The numbers are all too familiar: as of 2003, women earn an average of 80 cents for every dollar men earn, a figure that holds even when factors such as occupation, industry, race, marital status, and job tenure are accounted for. Women with bachelor's degrees earn $13,000 less per year than comparably educated men. For African American women with BAs, the gap grows even greater by $3,600. The gap is largest for Hispanic women with BAs, who earn $700 less than white men with high school diplomas.

These figures underscore the economic value of educational attainment even as they highlight the persistent wage gap. But, despite the economic benefits of higher education, young women with children face both economic and cultural barriers to higher education.

Traditional university models assume that students do not have children. As a result, colleges are only slowly providing resources to support students with young children. Likewise, Pamela Sandoval explains, young mothers who want to pursue college degrees must contend with pervasive expectations that they should abandon their educational ambitions in order to devote themselves to childcare and/or full-time employment.

Yet Sandoval's study of young mothers attending college challenges this common belief. She found that women, given adequate material support, were able to both care for their children and pursue their own education.

Getting There...With a Little Help
The women in Sandoval's study, all first-time mothers under the age of thirty, recognized that they could better provide for themselves and their children if they could earn a college degree. Achieving that goal, though, required young mothers to marshal material support for themselves and their children and to become adept at juggling school, family, and, often, work.

The mothers in Sandoval's study culled support from a variety of sources. Indirect support included housing, housework, and childcare provided by family and friends. Direct support came from financial aid and grants, employment on- or off-campus, financial support from a husband, a child's father, or family of origin, and government aid in the form of welfare, subsidized childcare, or food stamps.

Very rarely, if ever, were participants able to rely on any one source of material support. Most often, women drew on several kinds of support to provide both for her child's care and wellbeing as well as her own education. Even then, juggling the demands of family and school sometimes proved too much for participants--just half of the 28 participants had graduated seven years after the start of the study.

Pushing Women into the Workplace
Sandoval's study comes at a time when welfare reform has meant that single mothers on aid are now required to work, often in low wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement, rather than pursue higher education, effectively curtailing these women's access to educational attainment and economic advancement. Indeed, the Center for Women's Policy Studies has documented the impact of welfare reform on women's participation in higher education, noting dramatic drops in college enrollment of welfare recipients since the 1996 policy changes.

If young mothers are to take full advantage of the economic benefits of higher education, Sandoval argues, both educators and policy makers need to develop programs and policies that help these women provide for their material needs, making it easier to stay in school.

Source Information
Data on young college mothers come from Dr. Pamela Sandoval's study, "An Economy of Reproduction: Increasing Human and Cultural Capital Through Material Support Among College Mothers, Aged 30 and Under." For more information about the study, please contact Dr. Sandoval at psand@iun.edu.

Data on the wage gap is from the National Committee on Pay Equity Web site. For more information, please visit
www.pay-equity.org/.

For more information on welfare reform's impact on post-secondary education, visit the Center for Women's Policy Studies at www.centerwomenpolicy.org/index.htm.