Beginning in the summer of 2011, single parents will be offered more funding and support to earn higher education from Eastern Michigan University through a program called “Keys to Degrees,” funded by a $400,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
“Keys to Degrees” allows parents to live on campus in University apartments and attend classes year-round, enabling the parent to earn a bachelor’s degree in three years. With an on-campus program, the hope is to eliminate distractions and barriers single parents have when attempting to earn degrees.
According to its website, its mission statement is to “support children, families, and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society.”
Besides their education, participants will be given mentors with experience in their chosen career path. They will live closely together and be offered workshops and retreats that focus on their particular needs and interests with the goal to also educate student-parents and their children develop into participating members of their community.
Their children will attend the EMU Children’s Institute on campus, so the generations included in the program will be educated at the same time. According to EMU’s website, the Children’s Institute educates children ages 18 months through six years and provides a full-day program for toddlers or a half-day program for preschoolers and kindergartners.
EMU is replicating the “Keys to Degrees” program at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., which was established in 1992. Founded in 1939, Endicott offers both masters and bachelors degrees in professional and liberal arts. Endicott has about 2,200 undergraduate students and 2,000 graduate students.
According to Endicott’s brochure about the program, “In 2003, 42 percent of children living in a female-headed household with no father present are below the 100 percent poverty threshold— approximately $18,000 for a family of four.”
“The program is being brought to EMU because we wanted to make sure to serve the under represented population of the single-parent,” said Elise Buggs, program director for keys and degrees.
EMU hired Buggs to serve its single student-parent population. Buggs has a son and is a single mother in her second year of college.
“Support for this population at EMU is new,” Buggs said. “We hope to start sending out surveys, have events at the student center and be able to talk to single-parents about their needs and know what the demographic wants so that at the end of the day, we can retain these students.”
Under this grant, Eastern and Endicott will collaborate to begin the program at two more Michigan colleges in 2011.
“There will be a website up by the end of the month with a link for student-parents to access the application themselves,” Buggs said. “It is a diverse program for both men and women who are single parents.”
This program is open to low-income men and women ages 18-24 with children 18 months or older. It will accept up to 10 student-parents entering their freshman year. They must first be admitted to EMU and then can apply for the program.
“Single parents have been historically marginalized and shut out of higher education, due, in large measure, to the expense of high quality, licensed childcare,” said Lynette Findley, assistant vice president of retention and student success at EMU.
“This program is an outstanding opportunity to serve the large number of single parents in the greater metro Detroit area in order to improve quality of life for them and for their children.”
