I'm curious, like, what would you say are some of the other barriers that student parents navigate that institutions often overlook?

Yeah, I think most people go to childcare really quickly when we're talking about parenting, period, and when we talk about student parents.

And of course, it's critical, right? It's necessary that we have affordable, accessible childcare solutions.

again, on and off campus to ensure that parents make it to the graduation stage.

In my new book called Student Parent, I liken the need for childcare to our need for oxygen, right? Like air.

And instead of treating it as like, oh, a nice to have, we really need to be looking at childcare as an absolute critical component to our economic engine, right? And that parenting students need to have childcare solutions to get into college, go through college, complete college, right? But you're absolutely right.

It's one piece of what I like to consider a puzzle that we have to really look at holistically, you know, when it comes to creating these solutions.

And that's a lot of, I see that a lot, right, in my reporting on student parents I guess kind of taking our entire conversation in mind, if we revisit this conversation, let's say five years from now, what would you say meaningful progress looks like? And how will we know that higher education has really become a place where student parents don't just like survive, but they truly thrive on campus? I love that question.

We can't be, you know, uh, tough on crime enough to eradicate, uh, houselessness.

Yeah.

What's one of the beautiful things about what you were saying and the way that you've approached this is, is, is that these are people, like, with, with full lives and stories, and there's a why, you know, like you said.

And I think that's another part of the disconnect is that we look at people who are struggling, and we think of them as data points.

We...

They are faceless.

They don't have stories.

Yeah