The Invisible Half: How State Data Systems Overlook 875,000 Student Fathers
College Promise released a new resource in partnership with the American Institute for Boys and Men’s Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative (HEMAC), highlighting data collection as the essential first step toward effective support.
Last year, College Promise spoke with student fathers across the United States. Brian*, a senior at a large public university, described hisjourney bluntly: “It's been a lonely experience, and that's part of the game. That's something that we should be honest about.”
Despite a campus of 35,000 undergraduate students, Brian knows just one other student father. His isolation reflects a deeper institutional blind spot. At a campus event, the university president greeted Brian and his wife, then turned to his wife – who was not enrolled – and asked what she was studying. People don't expect to see a dad here in school,” Brian noted.
Brian’s isolation is a national pattern. While parenting students make up one in five undergraduates nationwide – including more than 875,000 fathers – they remain largely invisible, leading Inside Higher Ed to describe them as the “invisible of the invisible”on campus. Supporting these students begins by making them visible. Yet, most state higher education data systems still fail to track them.
Improving outcomes for students like Brian begins with making them visible. That requires a fundamental change in how higher education identifies and understands student fathers. Despite representing more than three-quarters of a million undergraduates, most state higher education data systems cannot answer even the most basic questions: How many student fathers are enrolled? Where are they studying? How are they progressing? What barriers do they face? And what are the long-term educational and economic costs of failing to support them?
We don’t know because those data largely do not exist.
Student fathers are present in our classrooms, yet they remain largely invisible in state higher education data systems. In some state systems, where parenting data do exist, they may not be reported by gender so fathers disappear a second time. Once we begin collecting and disaggregating these data, we can track their educational journeys, identify patterns hiding in plain sight, and, most importantly, use what we learn to design interventions and deliver improved outcomes.
This focuses on student fathers, not because other parenting populations do not matter, but because the data on student fathers in higher education remain particularly limited, the supports particularly scarce, and the audience for this group is well positioned to act. While there has been progress in recent years in accommodations for expecting and recent mothers, these supports are different than meeting the immediate needs of student fathers.