A Pregnant Cause

Student mothers say some small colleges make it difficult for them to stay in school

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By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL

Vanessa Elise Jimenez felt like she had won the lottery when, in the spring of 2000, an acceptance letter from Wellesley College arrived in her mailbox. The college promised to meet her full financial need, and the news gave her hope that she could become the first in her family who would not live from paycheck to paycheck.

Wellesley, a premier women's liberal arts college, was 2,000 miles and a world away from her home in San Antonio, Tex., but Ms. Jimenez thrived on the campus. In her first year, she joined 10 clubs and earned academic honors.

Then, while taking a year off to volunteer, she unexpectedly became pregnant. Ms. Jimenez, who was raised by a single mother, knew that juggling child rearing and a full-time course load would be tough, but she accepted the challenge. "In the end," she says, "I figured if I worked hard enough, I could make it through."

When Ms. Jimenez returned to Wellesley five months into her pregnancy, though, in the fall of 2003, college officials told her she could not live on the campus with her child. Moving off the campus meant she would lose $9,500 in grant money that covered her room and board.

Although Wellesley did provide Ms. Jimenez with loans equal to the grant money she had lost, and an additional $1,500 in loans for having a dependent, those funds did not cover the difference in housing costs between the dormitories and rental apartments in the affluent suburb of Wellesley. Living off campus, she would have to pay for heat, water, and Internet access — amenities that had been included in her housing costs at the college.

Three other current and former Wellesley students told The Chronicle that after becoming mothers, they too lost grant money that covered their housing costs. Recently, several campus groups have pressured the administration to make it easier for student mothers to complete their studies. The groups want students to be able to keep their grants even if they cannot live on the campus, and they would like the amount of housing aid given to reflect the actual cost of living off campus.

So far, Wellesley officials have not indicated that they will change their policy, which, they say, supports the preservation of the residential-college experience.

Wellesley is not the only small college that does not provide family housing. Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pa., also requires students with children to live off the campus. Both Pomona College, in Claremont, Calif., and Reed College, in Portland, Ore., also lack dormitories for student parents, but both colleges say they either have or would make arrangements for such students to remain on campus.

What is a college's obligation to students with children? Although national statistics suggest that the percentage of full-time traditional-age students who are also mothers has remained roughly the same during the past 20 years, students at some colleges are demanding that their institutions do more to accommodate undergraduates with children.

At the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park, as at Wellesley, student parents have become a popular cause for both pro-choice and anti-abortion groups, who say colleges need to make it easier for the students to balance their academic goals with their financial demands.

Lawmakers are also taking notice of the issue. In April the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Services Act of 2005. The bill, which would provide grants to colleges for child care, student family housing, and maternity insurance coverage, is pending in the Senate.

"Today," Rep. Melissa A. Hart, a Pennsylvania Republican who introduced the House bill, said in a written statement, "many students who are pregnant or already have children are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet while they are trying to complete their education."

'A Better Place'

The services available to students with children vary greatly depending on an institution's resources. Large research universities with hospitals and family-housing options can more easily accommodate undergraduates who need prenatal medical care or a subsidized place to live with their children.

Yet many small colleges like Wellesley, which has 2,300 students, may not be able to provide the same, according to Scott J. Spear, a physician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a volunteer with Planned Parenthood.

"I don't know of any college health center that is equipped to provide maternity care," says Dr. Spear. "Most mothers want to see the same doctor who will be delivering their baby, which requires them to be available 24 hours a day. Most of our centers are 9-to-5 operations."

Most colleges will, however, provide referrals for maternity care, and almost all college insurance health plans will cover this expense for students, says Dr. Spear. Many student health centers, including Wellesley's, do have a nurse-midwife on staff to provide some prenatal care.

Still, some small, residential colleges say they do not go so far as to provide housing for student parents because their space is limited and so few students request it.

"The issue has been pretty rare here," says H. Elizabeth Braun, dean of students at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass. "We're not equipped to house students with children at this time. ... There's been a housing crunch, and things are already tight on campus."

Unlike Wellesley, Mount Holyoke does not change the structure of its financial-aid packages for students who live off the campus, according to Kathy Blaisdell, the college's director of financial assistance.

But both colleges lack written policies on residential arrangements for students and their children. Ms. Jimenez says that by failing to acknowledge the issue in writing, Wellesley would rather pretend that students in her situation did not exist.

When she first asked administrators about the college's housing policy, Ms. Jimenez says she heard the same question repeatedly: "Isn't there a better place for you to go?"

"I told my dean, 'This was my better place,'" says Ms. Jimenez. "Wellesley was like a wonderland to me; it was the best place I had ever seen ... it was rather presumptuous of them to assume I had a perfect family situation I could just run back to."

Ms. Jimenez says she pleaded her case to Wellesley's president, Diana Chapman Walsh, during a private meeting in late November 2003, but to no avail.

Although Ms. Chapman Walsh declined The Chronicle's repeated requests for comment, the college's director of public information and government relations, Mary Ann Hill, confirms that Wellesley would not allow Ms. Jimenez to live on the campus with her daughter. The college, she notes, also forbids students to have guests, including relatives, in their dorms for more than three days at a time.

"Our financial-aid policies support our priority of being a residential institution," says Ms. Hill. "We place value on students living on campus, but students can choose for any number of reasons to not live on campus."

That is not to say that all children are barred from living in Wellesley's dorms. The college does allow resident directors — full-time paid staff members of the college — to reside in apartment-style units with their children.

Wellesley officials also confirm that in the past they have allowed students and their children to stay by living in spare campus apartments that were traditionally designated for faculty members. Ms. Jimenez wondered why the college could not make similar arrangements for her.

"Those students were exceptions to the normal practice and policy," says Ms. Hill. "The arrangement did not have a positive outcome for the students, who left Wellesley prior to graduating."

When asked if she thought Wellesley's policies made it more difficult for student mothers to earn their degrees, Ms. Hill declines to comment. She does say that many students at Wellesley face significant personal challenges, and that the college cannot finance "absolutely everything."

Making Ends Meet

After Ms. Jimenez gave birth to her daughter, Belyn, in December 2003, she moved off the campus. She and her child's father, Christopher, worked as live-in caretakers for an elderly woman who lived two hours away in Somerville, Mass. The couple clocked a combined total of 150 hours of work per week, while Ms. Jimenez took a full course load at Wellesley.

Ms. Jimenez also put in 10 hours a week at a work-study job on the campus. Even with their combined income, she says, the financial strain was overwhelming.

Her financial situation became even more challenging when she broke up with Christopher, who moved back to Texas and failed to send child support. Ms. Jimenez then moved in with Elizabeth Audley, another Wellesley student mother. The two lived together with their children in a house where Ms. Audley also worked as a caretaker. Space was tight, and every night, each woman slept in a twin bed with her baby.

In some ways, Ms. Audley's situation was less dire than Ms. Jimenez's. Because she was a resident of Massachusetts, Ms. Audley had access to more state resources, including welfare assistance and food stamps.

Even with the additional help, Ms. Audley says she was homeless during the summer between her sophomore and junior years after a processing error delayed her financial-aid check. She and her daughter, Lauren, spent two and a half months moving among the apartments of friends and relatives.

"I just kept telling myself that I was lucky I wasn't out on the street," says Ms. Audley. "If that had happened, I don't think I would have been able to bounce back from it."

She wondered what she would have done if she had not had family and friends in the area. She realized that for out-of-state students with children, like her friend Ms. Jimenez, things were worse. That led her to form Sister's Keepers, an advocacy group for student mothers at Wellesley.

Equal Opportunity

Ms. Chapman Walsh, the college's president, has said in speeches that Wellesley is a place where women have "not only equal opportunity but every opportunity." Ms. Audley often cites that quote when arguing that Wellesley should do more to help student mothers.

"We aren't asking Wellesley to do everything for us," says Ms. Audley. "We just don't think it's fair that we're given disadvantaged treatment for choosing to have children and raise them."

In addition to demanding changes in Wellesley's financial-aid policy for student parents, Sister's Keepers has asked the college to provide loans for full-time child care (the current loan structure allows only for part-time care). They also want Wellesley to put its housing policy in writing, so that students know their options when they matriculate.

At Wellesley, as well as at other campuses, the cause has unified groups on both sides of the abortion debate. Sister's Keepers raised $5,000 for an emergency relief fund for student mothers with the help of both the Wellesley Alliance for Women, an anti-abortion group, and Wellesley Women for Choice, a club that supports abortion rights.

"This is a way for both groups to get away from debating abortion and do something to help students who are choosing to become parents," says Serrin M. Foster, executive director of Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion group based in Washington.

Pro-choice groups see the issue as an opportunity to attract student activists who were born long after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, says Laura E. Faulkner, a senior who serves as president of Wellesley Women for Choice.

"We have had trouble for years with students being apathetic about our cause," says Ms. Faulkner. "The more we worked together with the pro-life group, the wider the student body support we had."

Similar efforts on other campuses have brought about modest changes. At Berkeley, students on both sides of the abortion debate raised enough money to install diaper-changing stations in many of the campus bathrooms. Students at the University of Virginia started a free baby-sitting service for student parents. And at Maryland, advocacy organizations helped form a support group for pregnant students and those with children.

Some of the students say they are often told the same thing by administrators:

Because there are relatively few student parents, they are not a priority.

"The students can work hard," says Michael Sciscenti, a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins University who was active in the college's anti-abortion group, "but if the administration is going to ignore the problem, not much is going to change."

Both Ms. Audley and Ms. Jimenez expect to graduate from Wellesley this June. Before they do, however, Ms. Audley hopes to draft a proposal for suggested changes in Wellesley's housing policy and present it to administrators.

Both students also say they could have left Wellesley to attend a cheaper or more accommodating college, but that staying was a way for each of them to prove they deserved to be there.

"I really felt like at times that I believed more in the empowerment of women against the odds than anyone in the administration did," says Ms. Audley.

It is possible that Ms. Audley's and Ms. Jimenez's experiences could change how Wellesley treats pregnant students in the future. According to Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, dean of students, Wellesley's financial-aid policy for student mothers has been "fair, given the population we're working with," as most students at Wellesley do not have children.

She adds that Wellesley's Elisabeth Kaiser Davis Degree Program, which allows students to take classes part time, is attracting more young mothers to the college than in the past. That increase, she says, might prompt college officials to revisit their financial-aid policies for students who live off the campus.

For Ms. Jimenez, the costs of rent and child care in Wellesley became too much. Last fall Ms. Jimenez says, she could not afford to pay for the statistical software that she needed for a class. She had exhausted her loans and says her credit cards are "a mess." So in January, Ms. Jimenez returned home to San Antonio, one credit shy of earning a degree in environmental studies.

This spring Ms. Jimenez has been taking a full load of courses at University of Texas at San Antonio College in order to qualify for financial aid. She will receive her diploma from Wellesley in the spring, but is unsure if she can afford to return to Massachusetts for her commencement.

"Hopefully," says Ms. Jimenez, "I'll be crossing that stage with everyone else."