volume 119, issue 96
monday, february 11, 2019
carlos garcia | the daily texan staff Psychology sophomore Lily Yeager holds her 18-month-old daughter, Adeline. She said it can be challenging being a full-time student and mother, but that she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her daughter.
‘It’s nonstop’: School as a single mom Student balances work, school and raising a child. By London Gibson @londongibson
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hen Lily Yeager started college, she went through the typical freshman checklist: buy textbooks, gather note-taking materials, pick out classes online. But Lily had more than just textbooks and pencils to worry about — At five months pregnant, she was also looking at cribs and baby clothes, and moving her finals around so they wouldn’t be too close to her due date. Lily, now 21, gave birth to her daughter Adeline shortly after her first semester at Lone Star College in Houston. She transferred to UT as a psychology sophomore last month. Despite the hardships that come with being a full-time student and mother, she often tells people she wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Adeline. “That’s kind of funny to say because, yeah, it would be so much easier to get a degree without an 18-month-old, but the thing is that I think being a young mom has shown me so much of what I’m capable of,” Lily said. “It’s given me a sense of drive that, if I really want to do this, I don’t have time to mess around.” More than 11 percent of undergraduate students nationwide are single mothers, according to a 2017 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. This number has doubled since 1999. Even though the number of single mothers attending school is growing, the rate of single moms with a college degree is still lower than those of married mothers or women in general. In 2015, only 31 percent of single mothers older than 25 had a college degree, according to the Institute. This isn’t entirely surprising, considering the many struggles that come with balancing education and full
financial responsibility. The USDA’s child expense calculator suggests a single parent student of a lower-income household can have an additional $4,800 in expenses per semester. At UT, and in an expensive city such as Austin, this number could be even higher. Adeline is now 18 months old, and at 30 inches tall, she’s almost half Lily’s height. While Lily is thin, with high cheekbones and long hair down to her waist, Adeline is plump with large, round cheeks and a small curl of blonde hair at the top of her head. “She is chunky, which in my opinion is the best type of baby,” Lily said, laughing. Although she’s cautiously quiet around strangers, noiselessly observing them with intelligent and watchful eyes, Adeline is quite silly at home, Lily said. She’s an easy child — she has been sleeping through the night since she was 6 weeks old. When she was accepted to the psychology program, Lily looked into enrolling Adeline in the UT Child Development Center, the campus daycare center for UT families. But with a waiting list of 842 children, the Center is hard to get into. More than 600 of those children are infants, meaning it could be more than two years before a young child is enrolled. “I’ll be completing my undergraduate experience here within three years max, I would say,” Lily said. “So the chances of my ability to utilize that resource are slim to none.” With a minimum rate of $850 per
How much more does it cost to be a financially independent parent at UT? + $3,280 Tuition for one semester at UT’s Child Development Center
+ $1,617 Additional child care costs for one semester
$4,000+ Total extra semesterly costs
“If I really want to do this, I don’t have time to mess around.”
L I LY Y E A G E R P S YC H O L O G Y S O P H O M O R E
month for infants, the Center is one of the more affordable care centers near campus. The state average for full-time child care is around $730 per month, but in Austin this can be much higher. Daycare centers can cost $1,000 to $1,200 per month in Central Austin. Center director Hara Cootes said the waiting list for infants is long because infants require more caretakers per child and it’s not financially viable for the Center to accommodate them. “When you look at a waiting list and you see that there are 629 infants on the list, you immediately think we should be expanding,” Cootes said. “But actually, for a program to be financially viable you must have a waiting list of older children, you can’t just have a waiting list of young children.” Education doctorate student Jessica Rubin got on the waiting list when she was three months pregnant with her son, but he didn’t get in until he was about a year-and-a-half old. “We were on the waiting list for a really long time,” Rubin said. “And between that I had to cobble things together, babysitters and friends, and things like that. He actually went to another daycare for a couple of months before they had a spot for him at the childcare center for UT.” Although the waiting list can pose difficulties for students attending school for two to four years, the Center is one of the largest university-affiliated child care centers in Texas. The Center currently serves 480 children, more than five times as many as there were when Cootes first started working there in 1992. It has also expanded to two other locations in that time. “I think you’ll see based just on the numbers that the University has made a commitment to childcare on campus and definitely to expansion,” Cootes said. Few single parents use the Center. Cootes said only 25 to 33 percent of the children at the Center are children of students, and almost all of those are graduate students. Although 11 percent of undergraduate students nationwide are single mothers, only onefifth of those students attend four-year colleges, according to the Institute. Rubin said the Center’s proximity to campus has been very helpful for her as she works “beyond full time” as a Ph.D. candidate, balancing taking classes, teaching classes and research with being a single mother. “Figuring out how to prioritize and how to get things done was really challenging,” Rubin said. “It was really hard. It’s not something that I would necessarily recommend. I don’t think that this is the best way to do either thing. But I think that I learned a lot about being a student from also
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