A 2024 report by New America and the Eviction Lab found that student parents aged 35 to 39 with school-age children faced an eviction filing rate of 22%, double the 11% rate among their nonstudent peers in the same age group with similar-aged children. The analysis examined court records from 73.2 million defendants in eviction cases between 2000 and 2018, linking that data with American Community Survey information to estimate filing rates by age, college enrollment status, and parenting status.
Among student parents aged 35 to 39 with children ages birth to 5, the eviction filing rate was 11%, compared to 6% for nonstudent parents in the same demographic. The report found that younger student parents generally faced slightly lower eviction filing rates than their nonstudent counterparts, a reversal in risk patterns observed among older cohorts.
Richard Davis, policy analyst at New America and co-author of the report, said, "There are a number of structural barriers in our financial aid system that don’t serve [student parents] best." He added, "When people think about housing, they think about the four-year institution and the on-campus housing students have available. But when you think about student parents, those needs are much different than the traditional college-age population. These students need more family housing that our higher education system really isn’t set up to meet." Davis also stated, "Our financial aid and higher ed system isn’t set up to serve the needs of older students well, so being able to have folks recognize that is important." Older students may have already exhausted their lifetime Pell Grant eligibility from prior college enrollment and may carry existing student loan debt, limiting their ability to cover housing and living expenses while re-enrolled.
Nick Graetz, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the report, said a variety of factors may contribute to the heightened eviction risk faced by older student parents, including the financial challenges of returning to college while balancing rising housing and childcare costs. He noted, "If older parenting students aren’t threatened with eviction, they end up doing just as well as similar student groups. It really speaks to how jarring and devastating an eviction filing can be, both because it reflects some of the deeper financial challenges people are facing and because the filing itself can have lasting consequences. It can end up on a tenant’s record and make it harder to secure housing in the future." Graetz emphasized that cost-of-attendance estimates at many institutions often fail to fully account for childcare and housing expenses in the private rental market. He pointed out, "Tenants are not guaranteed representation in housing court, and most eviction proceedings only take a few minutes because they’re churning through dozens of these a day. When tenants do have legal aid, it tends to turn out totally differently in terms of holding landlords to local landlord-tenant laws, making sure tenants receive the correct prefiling notice time—all these things that you just need a lawyer there to help navigate you through that process."