Graduate students with children navigate a complicated trifecta of professional, student and parent.
At Syracuse University, they struggle to find daycare, facing an array of obstacles. SU operates two daycare centers that meet only a fraction of the need. There are reservations about using centers not directly affiliated with the university. Student parents lack a formal network, and have also struggled to organize and advocate for themselves – adding to a communication gap with the university.
SU’s daycare centers are located on south campus – the Early Education and Child Care Center [12] and the Bernice Wright Nursery School [13]. While the latter offers part-time daycare, the EECCC is full time and takes infants, said Holley Benjamin, director of the EECCC.
The center takes a maximum of 60 children, but its facilities and curriculum generate a demand that far outstrips the care it can provide. The waitlist is about one to two years, and 175 children are currently on it, Benjamin said, though not all of them immediately need daycare. Forty-eight of those children have graduate student parents, she said.
The EECCC uses a sliding scale to determine cost, adjusting the price based on parent income. The lowest fee is $134 a week.
Still, cost is the most common reason student parents decline a spot, despite waiting months for an opening, Benjamin said.
As for children in the center, 16 are from graduate student families, one from an undergraduate family, 25 from faculty, and 18 from SU staff members, she said. Some parents belong to more than one category, but the center only requires parents to note one on the registration paperwork. She said she tries to take the same number of children from each group.
“Once you get in, you’re in until you graduate,” Benjamin said, referring to students’ children.
As an alternative, she said she refers parents to Childcare Solutions [14] — a local resources and referral agency that compiles daycare options based on criteria such as location and price.
The nonprofit agency lists only registered and licensed centers but doesn’t make recommendations to support parental choice and avoid giving preferential treatment, said Lori Boles, the agency’s executive director.
To Judson Murchie, a doctoral student in public administration and father of two children, the sheer volume of suggestions is unhelpful.
“It didn’t seem like there was a lot of screening with that,” he said. “I think it’s really hard to find out a lot about a daycare from a website or a phone number.”
A former financial consultant, he said he’s seen well-designed websites that don’t reflect the quality of the company – an observation that stayed with him while looking for daycare. For this reason, he prefers word of mouth.
His 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son currently go to The Gingerbread House of Syracuse [15] four days a week. Murchie said he pays about $200 a week for each child, estimating “a little more” for his son, Vincent.
Murchie initially struggled to find other parents after moving to Syracuse from Chicago — a common situation for out-of-state students. He said he’s also the only parent in his program.
“The school doesn’t have a lot of resources,” he said. “I found out more from my landlord and other people than I did from the university.”
He “got lucky,” finding The Gingerbread House through his landlord.
Murchie said SU could change this by having informational events for parents to meet each other and introduce them to local resources.
Courtney O’Dell-Chaib, a doctoral student in the religion department, also has two children — one 4 years old and the other 7 weeks old. She said her older son “has special needs” and requires a feeding tube, which several daycare centers she looked at seemed uncomfortable accommodating.
To find daycare for him, she deferred her admission to SU by a year. She said she was on SU daycare’s waiting list for two years, and any job her husband would’ve found at the time would have gone mostly to paying for childcare.
Many daycare centers also prefer parents who need full-time care —rather than students who seek part-time daycare — and choose accordingly, she said.
O’Dell said Childcare Solutions is “a really good resource” that helps students find city and state funding for childcare. But like Murchie, she was hesitant about the options she found through the agency. With SU daycare, she “knows it’s safe.”
“You know the university is backing whoever’s doing it, that they’d be safe, that there are other faculty members who take their kids there so you know it’s a good environment,” O’Dell said.
Her husband, a former Apple [16] employee, stayed home for two years to allow her to begin her doctorate coursework. O’Dell eventually found a babysitter through the School of Education [17].
All providers listed by Childcare Solutions have regular inspections, but Boles said she understands parents’ hesitation.
“We provide information to parents to help them become the eyes and ears and advocates for their children,” she said. The agency advises parents to visit centers and look for precautions such as outlet covers and medicine kept out of reach — information also on tip sheets the agency has available.
“The bottom line is, it’s the parents’ responsibility for the safety of their children,” she said. New state regulations in May updating safety standards might make parents more comfortable with local providers, Boles said.
Childcare Solutions distributes information through various venues, but Boles said the agency has problems promoting itself to parents.
“The marketing, I think we do a poor job of that across the board,” she said. “It’s definitely something we need to do a better job of.” Boles said the agency is currently doing an internal study to identify how it can improve.
Student parents have struggled to organize a formal way to advocate for themselves.
O’Dell was part of a Family Concerns Committee, formed by the Graduate Student Organization [18] to bring up childcare concerns with the university.
She said the committee dwindled as members, some of them master’s students, alumni and others began their dissertations, leaving O’Dell.
The biggest problem, she said, is that student parents generally don’t know who else has children, and aren’t cohesive enough as a group.
The students who participate the most in the GSO — their only real liaison with the university — are single with no children, which shifts parent concerns such as daycare to the bottom of the agenda, she said. Developing a consistent set of priorities from one president to another is also difficult, O’Dell said.
Patrick Neary, the GSO president, “has to do a million things,” she said. “To think that one person leading the GSO can take care of all these issues is ridiculous. He has to complete his ph.D, too.”
O’Dell said she wants the university to approach the issue of accounting for students with the least amount of support — as if incoming students have no spouses, and considering “actual financial constraints.”
While its fees make it the most affordable option, the EECC charges more than graduate students can afford, she said. O’Dell said she earns about $600 a month, and her husband works part time and attends community college full time.
“Part of the narrative of coming here was that there was childcare available,” she said. “Maybe I’m being harder on Syracuse because they’re already a step above other universities, but it’s because I think that they can do it.”
Parenting has forced her to clarify her professional goals and structure her time efficiently. Paradoxically, being a graduate student can be one of the best times to have children for a number of reasons, she said.
But juggling the two is still difficult, and can jeopardize the chances of staying in a program.
Several students from the religion department have had to leave because of a spouse losing their job, loss of a caretaker and other situations from the strain of balancing parenting and work, she said.
“The ph.D is not about surviving the coursework. It’s just the stamina to stay that many years,” O’Dell said. “While everyone has life stuff that can make it really hard for them, I think that there’s a tipping point for parents where they just can’t come back.”
What some parents have done is leave near the end of their program — when their degree work doesn’t require staying in Syracuse — and move where they have more support, O’Dell said. She said she and her family will most likely take that option by her fifth year.
As they’ve struggled to organize a way to communicate these needs to the university, graduate students have experienced disconnect with SU Human Capital Development [19], which manages campus daycare.
The university’s Childcare Advisory Committee is meant to address parenting needs. The committee wanted a graduate student voice, O’Dell said, but doesn’t meet frequently.
Kal Alston, senior vice president of Human Capital Development, oversees the Childcare Advisory Committee. It met last year and again in the fall to decide on childcare-related projects, assigning tasks to committee members.
“We met last year to define our priorities and then this year we wanted to make those things happen, so being in meetings isn’t getting things done,” Alston said. “So we worked on those projects outside the committee structure and brought back the various models to show the committee.”
Meetings were cancelled, she said, because the tasks related to those projects were ongoing.
“I’m a believer in not having meetings if there’s nothing to accomplish,” Alston said.
The committee discussed the availability of daycare in the beginning, but started focusing on projects addressing affordability, she said.
The university tried a pilot program this year offering childcare credit for children under 5 years old, but only made it available to faculty and staff, Alston said, since opening the program to students could have affected their financial aid. The money for that program came from a fund faculty and staff paid into, she said.
The committee, which includes GSO President Neary, agreed to explore a similar option for graduate students starting this fall, with a meeting scheduled “very shortly” to discuss that.
Alston said there currently are no details on expanding SU’s daycare centers, but the university might partner with other providers in the area, such as hospitals and other “big institutional players in town” with spaces SU could use to supplement SU’s daycare centers.
“That’s the next conversation – what else we should be doing while we’re talking about potentially changing our own facility,” Alston said.
She said she would be open to discussing these concerns if graduate students brought them up with the committee, or ask the committee to meet with them.
“To the extent that graduate students want to talk about these issues, we’re very happy to do it, and to try to make a plan to improve the way things are,” Alston said.
Benjamin, director of the EECCC, thinks the current number of children at the center is ideal, and would rather have more facilities than increase the center’s capacity, though she said she’d like to add another room for infants.
The center currently cares for six infants, but there’s more need for infant care than any other age group since such programs are rare in the community, she said. These programs are expensive, so a center giving good infant care will most likely need financial support, Benjamin said.
“Best practice is having a third of the school subsidized,” she said. Dartmouth College [20], for example, follows this model, but not many other schools do, Benjamin said.
SU helps fund the EECCC, which she considers evidence of the university’s commitment to childcare needs. Benjamin declined to specify an amount for the subsidy, but Alston described it as “substantial.”
O’Dell agrees the university is committed to supporting parents, but primarily those who are faculty. She said she wants to see the university invest in graduate students with children, who embody dedication to their programs.
“It took a lot to even get here, so I think the students who have made that sacrifice, who have uprooted their families before to live here are actually invested in completing this and trying to get employment in this field,” she said. “We are invested and are worthwhile.”
