One out of every five undergraduate students at colleges across the nation are parents, according to the Generation Hope website. But students who are parents are 10 times less likely to graduate than other college students.  

That’s a statistic that Madison College and Generation Hope’s FamilyU program hopes to change. 

Madison College is one of seven higher education institutions to be selected to participate in Generation Hope’s second FamilyU cohort. 

According to information posted in Madison College Matters, the FamilyU technical assistance program is a two-year program designed to help parents succeed in the classroom. It does this by “focusing on building and refining institutional competencies such as increasing awareness of the student parent population, boosting student enrollment and retention, and improving data collection methods and tools to better track the status of parenting students.”  

Everyone deserves the privilege to improve their education level for all different reasons, maybe it is getting your general education classes taken care of then transfer into a four-year school like The University of Wisconsin, Madison.  

Others may want some more training to help them land a decent paying job to help support their families, and some even may just enjoy school are more of a scholar who likes to learn whatever they can! No matter what the reason is everyone deserves the right to an education – success is one of life’s greatest feelings.   

FamilyU focuses on increasing the number of student parents to help them succeed and graduate college. Students with families are less likely to graduate due to understandable circumstances – they have a family to support. That is why FamilyU is campaigning to help these parents graduate and boost that number of graduation statistics of parents to be much higher than it is currently. 

During its participation in the FamilyU Program, the Madison College’s FamilyU team will join in four peer-learning cohort meetings throughout the year and have coaching sessions that identify and strengthen the college’s student parent efforts. 

Madison College’s FamilyU cohort includes Santa Fe Community College, Mesa College San Diego, Norfolk State University, Austin Community College, Houston Community College and Virginia State University.