A Community College Where Student-Parents Are Supported—and Succeed

When Madison College sent out a “basic needs” student survey a few years ago, a surprising statistic emerged: 42 percent of respondents were parenting young children, from birth to school age. Student-parents, who account for an estimated 18 percent of undergraduate students nationwide, tend to be older than the typical student and are less likely to graduate. Within six years, about one-third of student-parents complete a degree or credential compared to more than half of traditionally aged, non-parenting students. 

With these challenges, college leaders saw opportunity. They sprang into action and built a flexible system of practical supports to smooth out common road bumps and help more student-parents persist through their courses of study, even as the school built out new data tools to track and analyze student-parent outcomes. 

“What we know about student-parents, from the national research, is that they are often the most motivated students—and also the first to leave,” said Valentina Ahedo, Interim Vice President for Student Affairs. “We went from not being able to really know or understand who these students are to getting the data and putting it to work.” 

The sheer number of student-parents and persistent shortages and high cost of childcare made a campus daycare center expansion a top priority. In 2021, Madison College refurbished a former truck-rental facility next to its main Truax Madison camp campus and opened a new childcare center for children six weeks to five years old. In 2023, data leaders integrated parenthood status into its Student Information System to identify student-parents and track their outcomes over time. College leaders also built a new one-stop resource page for student-parents with links to grants, scholarships, and logistical supports. 

Throughout 2024 and 2025, leaders continued to address student-parents’ pressing need for daycare. They worked with state and local agencies, which facilitated the purchase of an old fire station for $1, and launched a fundraising campaign to build a second daycare center, slated to open at the Goodman South campus in fall 2026. 

As these supports have come online, Madison College (also known as Madison Area Technical College) is beginning to investigate and assess their impacts, said former SDP-CTE Fellow Zong Her, who is leading these efforts as the Director of Institutional Research & Data Management. It is motivated by supporting a spectrum of needs and a “two-generation” approach, she said. 

“We have a lot of resources all over the place, but we need them to be working together,” she said. “Childcare is great, but it’s not enough if you don’t have diapers, or food on your table. That’s the type of thing we want to look at, exploring holistic supports. . . We’re not going to be able to provide everything, so we want to develop the right partnerships to get students what they need.” 

Using data to measure the effectiveness of such supports is at the heart of what we value and uplift at the Strategic Data Project. Our 2024 award, in line with the 2024 SDP Convening theme of “Just Numbers,” was designed to specifically honor the human dimension of such analysis. What have the impacts of Madison College’s student-parent analysis been? Read on. 

From Dropping Out to Two Degrees 

For Haley Shreve, 25, the summer of 2025 is capping off an extraordinarily busy three years. 

First, she earned her GED. Then, she simultaneously earned two associate degrees in information technology: cybersecurity and network systems administration. All the while, she was minding her family’s tight budget and caring for two fast-growing children with her partner at home: Ivy, now 5, and her stepdaughter Khloe, 13. 

“Honestly, without the childcare at Madison College, I don’t think I would have been able to go to college,” said Shreve, whose subsidized monthly daycare fee was less than $50. 

Financial responsibilities have waylaid her education in the past. By the 10th grade, Shreve was already working full-time to support the family household and opted to drop out. “I had to make the difficult decision to either continue working, instead of going to high school and not being able to have necessities,” she said. “I always enjoyed school, but it hasn’t always been an option.” 

Those early working years included jobs at McDonald’s and Walmart, a stint as a volunteer firefighter, and working a restaurant server. She was a stay-at-home parent after the birth of her daughter Ivy and reconsidered her education and professional options as her daughter grew. 

In those early jobs, “you don’t really get to be home on the holidays with your family or be home on the weekends with your kids,” she said. “I just didn’t like the working options I had without getting my GED or even going to college.” 

Shreve rebooted her education by taking free coding classes online, and found she had a talent for it. Madison College provided a ready pathway to a high school diploma and postsecondary study in IT, so in 2022, she earned her GED. When she learned about the college’s daycare center and student-parent supports, “it was like—OK, this is it. I can commit to this,” she said. She enrolled as a full-time student. 

Three years of hard work—late nights perfecting a project, early mornings getting young children off to school—were well worth it, she said. The availability of childcare, financial supports, and culture of grace and flexibility for student-parents kept her studies on track. An on-campus job tutoring other IT students and troubleshooting IT issues for professors has been a ready source of additional income. Best of all, she works and studies next door to the daycare center that has helped her daughter get ready for kindergarten in the fall. 

“What holds back a lot of student-parents is that there’s not childcare available, or the professors are not understanding about the struggles of student-parents,” Shreve said. “We do not have family nearby or that kind of support system. Without what Madison College provides, this would not have been possible.” 

An On-Ramp to Undergrad 

When Natalie Wepking was growing up, graduating from college felt unattainable. But having a baby while raising a stepdaughter inspired her to dream big for them, and herself. 

“I wanted my kids to see that they are capable of doing anything they want to do,” said Wepking, 30. “So I decided to pursue my dream of helping people, and I surprised myself by being a great student and achieving the high grades that I was always told I could never achieve.” 

After years as a stay-at-home parent, Wepking is well on her way to an undergraduate degree through Madison College’s University Transfer Program. She is completing general-education requirements and plans to pursue a Bachelor’s of Science in Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by a master’s in the School of Social Work. Through an agreement between the state’s technical college and university systems, her Madison College credits will count toward a four-year degree. 

“I want to help people, and I really want to be a social worker for the elderly,” she said. 

Wepking has received Pell Grants and a CCAMPIS scholarship, as well as subsidies that reduce her monthly daycare bill from roughly $1,000 to about $50, she said. Those subsidies support not just Wepking, but her extended family as well. For example, after a previous daycare center proved unstable and unsafe, a relative quit her job and switched to an overnight, third-shift job to care for Wepking’s young daughter Kimani, she said.  

While helpful, “it was only while I was in class, and it was really difficult to get any work done at home with a toddler, especially when you are trying to support their development,” she said. The full-time care at the onsite center leaves Wepking time for study without compromising her daughter’s growth. Now four years old, Kimani’s vocabulary, fine-motor skills, and ability to articulate and regulate her emotions have all grown dramatically over the past year. 

“She can do zippers, she can push snaps together with her fingers,” Wepking said. “Instead of just knowing basic emotions like happy and sad, she talks about being nervous. She can identify complex color structures and really go into detail about what she sees and feels.” 

Meanwhile, Wepking has time to attend class and study at school. But she still records lectures to replay at home while completing household chores and polishing paper drafts, focused on earning A’s. 

“I cried when I got the call that she had a spot in the campus daycare center,” said Wepking. “This is the best thing that ever happened to our family.” 

Reskilling for a Family-Sustaining Career 

Nearly a decade after earning a degree in music performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ela Young was ready for a new career. It was tough to make a living as a violinist, and she found herself working day jobs that kept her unhappily tethered to a desk. Nursing beckoned—after all, her mother and mother-in-law are both nurses—and she went back to school. 

“I wanted something that would keep me interested, and nursing has a lot of options,” said Young, 36. “It felt like a really great fit for me.” 

But early on, she and her husband learned they were expecting their first child. They welcomed baby Winona in June 2021, when Young was chipping away at her nursing prerequisites and continuing to work outside the home.  

It was the sort of interruption that is often a fork in the road. But after a semester at home with a newborn, Young was back at school and work. She was accepted into the nursing degree program in 2023, graduated in two years, and is planning to work in critical care after passing her board exam.   

Young initially considered pursuing her nursing degree at her alma mater UW-Madison, where her husband works in a research lab. But wary of debt, she chose Madison College and found a series of supports and a culture of flexibility that allowed her to stay on track at school without sacrificing her daughter’s care. She applied for and received scholarships of up to $2,000 each semester, defraying the cost of tuition. The school’s emergency fund provides grants of $500 or more on occasion, which helped pay for dental appointments and other one-off expenses, while a food pantry has helped stretch her family’s grocery budget. 

Best of all is the daycare center, where Winona loves to paint and draw. She and her husband pay about $1,000 per month for care Young describes as “evidence-based, high-quality, and paying attention to the development of the child.” There’s a study room for parents and flexibility with the occasional late payment, too. 

“Winona’s teachers understand that I am a student,” she said. “They are not only supportive of her, but supportive of us as a family.” 

These integrated supports have helped her persist and complete her prerequisites and degree amid the challenges of new parenthood, providing flexibility, financial stability, and the peace of mind that comes from “knowing my daughter’s development is being looked after, so I can focus on school during the day,” she said. 

“It feels so empowering for me to have gone back to school as an adult,” she said. “I always made enough money, but it never felt like we had enough to plan for the future. Being a nurse, this means having an education fund for my kid. It means I can have another kid. I have security, and I can advance in my career. The opportunities are endless."