With her 9-month-old strapped onto her chest, a loaded backpack on her shoulders, a baby go-bag in one hand and two midterm study guides in the other, Student A made her way up the hill by Janss Steps to squeeze in an extra study session outdoors.
“OK, we’ll go over the nature of war now,” said Student A, a second-year Middle Eastern studies student, to her daughter Mia. “First, you have to understand the theories of war.”
Student A thought for a second, took a glance at her notes and recited definitions of war theories to her baby.
It was a hectic morning for Student A. Mia woke up earlier than usual, and, because her husband was already at work, Student A was left to prepare her baby’s food and pack up her supplies before heading to campus, all while stressing over her upcoming exams.
A little over a week before 2019 spring quarter finals, Student A was nine months pregnant and about a day away from giving birth. Student A only allowed herself five days to recover in the hospital before returning to school to take her finals.
“During those days, I was in the hospital FaceTiming (in) for my lectures,” Student A said. “I was coordinating times with my professors and the (teaching assistants) on when it would be OK to dial in. I didn't miss a beat.”
Student A is also an active duty Marine at UCLA as a part of the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program, a highly competitive program that allows selected participants to pursue a bachelor’s degree while remaining on active duty and participating in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, or NROTC.
Student A’s days begin at 4:30 a.m., and as her baby sleeps for the next two hours, she takes advantage of this time to do housework, finish readings, do homework and prepare to head to campus with her daughter for mandatory NROTC physical fitness training.
While Student A attends her NROTC functions, she said she often relies on a friend to babysit Mia before going about the rest of her day. In some cases, Student A’s husband takes over the child care, but sometimes Student A has had no other choice but to take her infant daughter with her to class.
“Discussions were late in the evening and I was breastfeeding at the time still,” Student A said of fall quarter. “I didn't want to be away from my baby from 6 (a.m.) to 6 in the evening because I was here early.”
Students with dependents compose a small portion of UCLA’s overall student body. Gauging the exact number of students is difficult because there is no formal marker included in the University of California application, but, in 2018, there were about 388 enrolled undergraduates with dependents.
This modest population faces significant obstacles while attending a four-year university. On average, parenting students face lower graduation rates and have higher financial needs than traditional undergraduates.
In 2019, Isabel Oraha, a fourth-year history student, was elected to the Undergraduate Students Association Council as the transfer student representative. Her platform was based on expanding child care and prioritizing the needs of students with dependents.
UCLA operates three Early Care and Education, or ECE, centers – two on campus and one off campus at the University Village. Of these three, only two child care centers serve student families, while the third exclusively serves staff and faculty families.
In total, the two centers that include student families only accommodate approximately 275 children for at least 388 parents with dependents, leading to exorbitant waitlist times and tuition costs between $1,650 and $2,795 per month, depending on the age of the child.
“It's very obvious that the ECE centers just were never made with students really in mind,” Oraha said. “It's not really a matter of changing policy. It's literally that there's no space.”
Lack of child care can be especially distressing during emergencies when the child needs their parent.
Gustavo Tepetla’s 6:30 p.m. visual and performing arts education class had just begun when he received an urgent call. Tepetla, a third-year design media arts student, found out his 3-year-old daughter Kayla broke her arm. Tepetla informed his professors, who assured him they were OK with him leaving class to tend to his daughter.
However, Tepetla’s family, who had been caring for Kayla when it happened, told him that by the time he fought the evening traffic and made it home to the San Fernando Valley, everything would already be under control at the hospital.
“I ended up staying in class,” Tepetla said. “But again, I'm in class, I'm being told, ‘Don't worry.’ But of course – I'm a parent, so I'm concerned the entire time.”
Tepetla, a single father, also lives with a disability – a car accident over two years ago caused permanent injuries to his arms and legs, shoulder strains and difficulty walking. Although he should have been given a parking permit for this disability, Tepetla was unaware of the new online Bruin ePermit system, and the application period had passed when he attempted to apply over the summer.
He filed a special appeal, but despite being both a disabled and parenting student, Tepetla had not heard back from UCLA Transportation by the first day of fall quarter. For a disabled single father, having a parking permit is imperative. In order to sort out the issue, Tepetla was forced to risk parking tickets and appeal for a parking permit in person. Only when he physically went to the transportation office on campus was he able to verify his eligibility for a parking pass and secure the permit.
Additionally, his daughter was diagnosed with autism, presenting another challenge for him as he fights to get the best treatment plan he can for Kayla.
Taking care of the emergencies that arise as a parent, while also dealing with school, would be a lot easier if he knew his daughter was being taken care of somewhere nearby, Tepetla said. But being away from her for over 12 hours a day while he is at school keeps him from focusing on class work and extracurriculars.
Tepetla makes the hour long commute home to spend time with his daughter until she falls asleep. Then, he starts his school work.
“If she was here and ... she broke her arm and I'm here, then I could easily walk out of class, let my professors know, walk her over to (Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center), have her treated and everything taken care of,” Tepetla said.
But the lack of financial stability Tepetla and many other students with dependents face prevents him from accessing resources supposedly in place to help students with dependents, such as family housing at the University Village and child care.
The University Village Apartments is the only housing offered to families. Monthly apartment rates range from $1,484 for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, and up to $1,999 for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment.
In the long run, it is more financially feasible to commute several hours a day and scramble to find child care than to pay thousands for either resource, Tepetla said.
Alternative programs are in place, such as the Little Bruins Clubhouse at the John Wooden Center, but the weekday evening hours of 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. are often unhelpful to parenting students whose classes are usually during the mornings and afternoons.
Scheduling classes at times convenient for these students has also been particularly difficult. Fortunately for Student A, her NROTC status means she falls under one of the groups with priority enrollment at UCLA, meaning she is able to plan her weeks to be as efficient as they can be.
Other students with dependents, such as Tepetla, have been able to access some degree of priority enrollment through the Center for Accessible Education. Students with dependents in general, however, are not a part of the groups that have priority enrollment.
As a single mother of a 4-year-old daughter, third-year sociology student Adrienne Carruthers chose to attend UCLA because her options of going school were limited by location. For Carruthers, coming to UCLA was not a matter of choosing her dream school – it was simply the most practical option for her as a working mother.
Carruthers finds that her selection of classes is drastically limited because she can only be on campus on select days and has to work around her daughter’s schedule, and classes fill up faster than Carruthers can get the chance to enroll.
With her daughter at school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Carruthers has to plan accordingly. She cannot attend a class before 9 a.m. because she has to be there to drop off her daughter, but in one instance, the only option for a discussion section was at 8 a.m.
Knowing she would not be able to make it, Carruthers enrolled anyway and managed to find someone willing to switch the 8 a.m. discussion with a later one at 8 p.m. Being on campus so late then presents another challenge, forcing Carruthers to ask friends and family if they can watch her daughter while she is at school.
For Carruthers, transitioning from her community college’s semester system to UCLA’s quarter system was complicated by the inability to select classes that allowed her to be there for her daughter. Carruthers’ community college also offered priority enrollment for parenting students and a variety of scheduled class times, which Carruthers said made it easier to be both a student and a parent.
At her community college, classes were offered at a variety of time slots and online classes were offered, which help accommodate a working parent’s schedule. However, Carruthers found at UCLA that even classes that would be easier to take, such as online classes, fill up before her enrollment pass opens.
Other UC schools, such as UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, provide priority enrollment passes for parenting students, but UCLA falls behind in assisting them with balancing their academics with being a parent.
Priority enrollment for students with dependents has been on the table for years at UCLA. In 2016, a parenting student at a USAC meeting advocated for priority enrollment, and before that, in 2015, a proposal was sent to the Academic Senate, which, at the time, had no formal committee organized to process these demands, Oraha said.
The proposal was lost in the disorganization of the USAC bureaucracy.
Zuleika Bravo, a third-year Latin American studies and political science student and chair of Parenting Students at UCLA, took her firsthand experience as a parenting student and began advocating for a change in policy.
Bravo had put off required classes for her major, either because the offered class times clashed with her responsibilities as a mother or because she was unable to secure a spot in a class that would have been convenient.
Last year, Bravo struggled to enroll in an American politics class, which is required for the political science major. All the offered class times were either too early or too late for her schedule. In the early mornings, she had to drop her daughter off at school and be there in the afternoon to pick her up. Even if Bravo could have worked around these times, by the time her enrollment pass rolled around, the class was full.
Bravo will have to stay at UCLA an extra year to complete her double major.
When Oraha and Bravo met in mid-2019, Bravo helped Oraha organize her parenting-students-based campaign. Once Oraha was elected, they planned to officially revise the original failed proposal and push their new draft through the bureaucratic hurdles that halted the proposal for priority enrollment several years ago.
In fall 2009, the Undergraduate Council of the Academic Senate cut priority enrollment numbers from 8,300 to around 1,500.
Since then, very few groups have been added to the list of priority-enrollment-eligible groups, including foster youth and veterans. Athletes and regents scholars, though, maintain their priority enrollments.
An ad hoc committee dedicated to processing these requests and considering if there is a significant need for priority enrollment was then established. The committee then assesses the impact of granting the request on the student body as a whole and deciding how many units would be allocated to the priority groups if their request is granted.
“It feels like a very obvious ask,” Oraha said. “And I think a lot of academic senators can relate to having children and being bound to the schedule of public school. Hopefully they really appreciate that. There’s a significant portion of students here that are trying to get an education while oftentimes raising a child or caring for a younger sibling on their own.”
Oraha and Bravo began a petition to foster support for priority enrollment from UCLA’s student body while their proposal is under review and awaits a formal vote from the Academic Senate.
The only way anyone would know if a student has dependents is by asking them – their struggles and needs would otherwise go unnoticed, Oraha said.
There are resources available to them, such as food closets, lactation rooms and special accomodations for pregnant students, Bravo said. But many go through their undergraduate education completely unaware of most of these resources because there is no way for organizations to identify and reach out to this population en masse.
The life of a parenting student is multilayered, Tepetla said. As parents and students, one cannot only focus on getting through school; a parents are constantly concerned with the well-being of their children, making sure they have food, clothes, a home and that they are safe. If sacrificing mental health, sleep and forgoing other responsibilities is the only way to make ends meet, many parents – especially students – have no choice.
“It's always good to be mindful around parenting students, because you don't know if they slept that night,” he said. “You don't know if they've skipped a couple of meals already as a day has gone by.”