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Bianca Rojas and her partner, Jose Yat, balance going to school with caring for their two toddlers. PHOTO BY IRIS SCHNEIDER/ CALMATTERS
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Rojas has a lot to balance—classes, papers, exams, research. Unlike most of her peers, though, the 25-year-old Cal State Long Beach sociology major also has two extracurricular obligations: Jasper and Adeline, her todAbout this story: dlers. It is an abridged Each semesversion of the origiter, she said, she nal, which can carefully budgets be found on CalMatters.org, a her financial aid, nonprofit, nonparcalculating the tisan media venture credits she can explaining California afford, given the policies and politics. needs of her family. It’s stressful: Last semester, she and her partner, a student at Cal Poly Pomona, had to take turns skipping classes, if necessary, to tend the children. “I had to seek counseling because I was just overwhelmed,” Rojas said. “It was a really difficult time because it was just not enough resources available. You find out too late, like, ‘Oh, there’s not going to be child care for you at this time.’ It’s like, then what do you do? Not go to school?” Students such as Rojas were who Gov. Gavin Newsom had in mind this year when he injected millions of dollars into the state
higher education budget to increase financial aid for young parents attending the University of California, California State University and the California Community Colleges. More than 300,000 California students are supported by the state’s main financial aid program, known as Cal Grant; last year, about 32,000 of them also were parents. Newsom’s budget, among other things, increased awards to up $6,000 for UC, Cal State and community college students with children, promising “real relief to our parents who are getting an education at the same time.” But high demand and administrative delays have slowed that relief, and made it clear that more work remains to improve state aid for so-called “nontraditional” students. Those students—who are completing degrees later in life as opposed to right after high school— have become a policy focus as California seeks to boost college graduation rates amid a projected shortfall by 2030 of 1.1 million bachelor’s-degree-holding workers. Students with children “are increasingly becoming the norm,” said David O’Brien, director of government affairs for the California
Student Aid Commission, which administers Cal Grants. “It’s why the Student Aid Commission is at the forefront of an effort to modernize California financial aid to better serve the needs of the student of today as opposed to what was the traditional student of 30 or 40 years ago.” So far this year, room for improve-
ment has revealed itself in at least two areas of that effort. For one, the allocation of the additional grant money is structured in a way that still makes it hard for students with children to qualify. The state guarantees Cal Grants for eligible students attending college right out of high school, but aid for nontraditional students comes out of a more limited grant pool for which applicants must compete, and most students with children fall into that nontraditional group. In the 2017-18 budget year, only 25,750 competitive grants were available for the more than 340,000 qualified applicants, according to a report by the California Budget and Policy Center. Newsom’s appropriation this year increased the number of competitive grants to 41,000, but the demand still exceeded 300,000—meaning the new money for nontraditional students is still comparatively hard to get. The grant money for parents has also been delayed by procedural glitches, according to state officials. “We hope to have the initial round of grants distributed by this