New America Releases Issue Brief on the Impact of Eviction Threats on Parenting Students
Jul 07, 2025
New America Releases Issue Brief on the Impact of Eviction Threats on Parenting Students
New America, an Opportunity Starts at Home (OSAH) campaign Roundtable member, released a new issue brief, “Ousted from Opportunity: Eviction’s Adverse Impact on Parenting College Students,” analyzing Eviction Lab data to understand the impact of eviction on parents attending college while caring for children. This demographic represents one out of every five undergraduate students in the U.S. While obtaining a post-secondary degree often leads to long-term economic security, parenting students face significant challenges achieving this while meeting basic food and housing needs for their families. The brief provides an overview of the unique challenges faced by parenting students, and data analysis reveals that the threat of eviction can have devastating consequences on these students, impacting their likelihood to complete their degree and their life expectancy. The brief concludes with policy and practice recommendations and ideas for future research.
Parenting students often come from historically underserved populations and face additional challenges to attaining a college degree compared to non-parenting students. Parenting students tend to be older than non-parenting students and are more likely to be women, especially women of color. They are also more likely to have low incomes, be first generation college students, and be veterans. Parenting students face higher rates of food insecurity and are more likely to work full-time. They tend to pay more in housing costs, in addition to expenses like childcare, compared to non-parenting students. While parenting students tend to have similar or slightly better GPAs than non-parenting students, they are significantly less likely to complete a degree, more likely to face financial barriers, and generally do not receive more financial aid than non-parenting students with similar financial profiles. While higher education institutions have increased their focus on meeting students’ basic needs to support their academic success, addressing food insecurity has seen greater policy attention among institutions compared to housing insecurity and homelessness.
The brief builds on existing research demonstrating that housing insecurity leads to a reduced likelihood of credential attainment and lower GPAs, along with negative impacts on mental and physical health. The authors used data from the “Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes” database to link 12 million student records from 2001-2022 with eviction court records compiled by Eviction Lab from 2000-2018, supplemented by survey and administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, to determine individual demographics, income, marital status, and parenting status. The analysis considers students threatened with evictions as those who receive an eviction filing in court.
The analysis reveals seven key findings:
Parenting students threatened by eviction tend to be younger than parenting students not threatened with eviction, with 44% of parenting students threatened with eviction under age 24.
Those threatened with eviction also tend to have parents with lower incomes.
Regardless of if they are parents or not, Black students are significantly more likely to receive a threat of eviction. Black parenting students are most at risk, representing 57% of all parenting students threatened with eviction while only representing 20% of parenting students in the sample.
Parenting students threatened with eviction are also much more likely to identify as women and represent 81% of those threatened with eviction.
The rate of bachelor’s degree completion among parenting students who never receive an eviction threat is 38%. For parenting students who do receive a threat of eviction, the rate drops to 15%-- a 23-point difference.
Those threatened with eviction also have much lower annual income five years post-enrollment, with post-enrollment household income for parenting students threatened with eviction less than half the income of those who did not face eviction.
Finally, the analysis finds that parenting students threatened with eviction die at higher rates ten years post-enrollment. Parenting students who received a threat of eviction were more than twice as likely to die over the ten years following enrollment than parenting students who were not threatened, and they have significantly higher mortality rates than those of non-parenting students threatened with eviction.
These findings demonstrate a need for additional support to prevent housing instability among parents pursuing higher education. The authors conclude that reducing the threat of eviction for both parenting and non-parenting students would increase college completion rates overall, and addressing housing insecurity among students threatened with eviction expands the impact of federal investment in higher education. While many colleges are responding to students’ needs, including housing, support must be complemented by state and federal investments as well as policy reforms to improve affordability in higher education.
Read the brief here.