President Donald Trump’s war on higher education has been a central feature of his second term — with Trump targeting student protesters for deportation, revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, and yanking billions in research funding.
But while Trump reserves much of his more public rancor for university presidents, student activists, and faculty, his administration is also preparing to launch an assault on a largely invisible population on college campuses: parents.
Earlier this month,the Trump administration proposed eliminating Child Care Access Means Parents in School, also known as CCAMPIS: the only child care program exclusively for lower-income students who are parents. Tucked into Trump’s proposed annual budget from earlier this month is a plan to eliminate all $75 million in funding for CCAMPIS.
That’s separate from the $1.6 billion in cuts to tuition assistance for lower-income students proposed by House Republicans in their “Big, Beautiful, Bill,” which is predicted to be the largest wealth transfer, in the form of tax cuts, from the poor to the rich in the nation’s history.
Despite the relatively low profile of parenting students on college campuses, over 22 percent of college students are parents, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Of those roughly 3.8 million students, more than half have at least one child under the age of 5.
Experts argue that these cuts align with the Trump administration’s efforts to lock lower-income students and parents out of higher education, which will have generational consequences for the thousands of families reliant on the already critically underfunded program.
“It’s part of a broader agenda to make education less accessible, particularly for low-income students.”
“It’s part of a broader agenda to make education less accessible, particularly for low-income students,” said Jennifer Turner, a senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We know that education is a pathway to economic mobility for [student parents] and for their children and then for future generations to come.”
