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Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on the intersections of community colleges and child care. Other articles in the series are available here.
Community college students are often balancing lives and responsibilities outside of school — from work to family obligations. For students with young children, the struggle to find and afford child care can make a tricky balance close to impossible.
Colleges across the state are finding ways to lessen the burden of child care challenges for their students and communities, from providing on-campus child care and subsidies to strengthening and expanding the child care workforce.
And state leaders are calling for more colleges to follow suit.
“I’ve been saying, all of the 58 need to have child care,” said Sen. Jim Burgin, R-Harnett — referring to the state’s 58 community colleges — at the December 2025 meeting of the North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education, which he co-chairs.
On-campus child care is also a priority of Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt, a Democrat, who co-chairs the task force with Burgin. Hunt’s “Future-Ready North Carolina” plan says on-campus centers would “leverage our excellent community colleges, strengthen experiential programs for child care professionals, and increase options for students and working families.”
Child care is a critical yet often left out strategy for colleges and policymakers to consider as they work toward attainment goals and reengage adult learners. Models and investments that provide child care for parents as they earn credentials and degrees matter for student access, affordability, and success in school, research says. These strategies also have intergenerational benefits, experts say, relieving families from poverty while exposing children to high-quality early childhood experiences.
When students cannot access or afford care, it risks “their personal investment in education and federal and state investments in postsecondary success,” write New America researchers who studied student parents’ experiences and colleges’ child care approaches at 10 community colleges across the country, including Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem.
“Within a broken child care system, colleges alone can’t solve the workforce, supply, quality, and affordability issues that plague families, providers, and communities,” the New America researchers write. “Still, there is reason for hope, and colleges can adopt strategies to better meet the needs of their parenting students.”
Community college students with young children face the same child care crisis all families are experiencing.
About 44% of the child care need in North Carolina was unmet by its supply, according to an analysis using 2020 data by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska. The analysis identified 257,670 children without access to child care within a reasonable distance.
Graphic by Lanie Sorrow
The following map shows the real-time supply of North Carolina licensed child care providers — as well as all 58 community colleges, including their satellite campuses. Use the filters to explore availability through different geographic lenses: by congressional or state legislative districts, counties, regions, or census tracts.
If a region is red, that signifies a child care supply and demand gap, or a “desert,” which in this map means there are at least 50 children with all parents working and that there are at least three children per child care slot in that area.
The map defaults to showing regions as the geographic boundary. To view child care “deserts,” toggle on smaller geographic boundaries. For example, when viewing the map by county, eight counties are red. When viewing the map by census tract, many more areas are red.
The orange circles with graduation caps represent community college campuses. The inclusion of community college campuses on this map allows community college leaders to assess if they have available space, on a main or satellite campus, that is located in a child care desert.
Click on a county or region for more information, including the average cost of child care, median family income, and the types of child care programs in the area. You can also view the map in a separate browser here.
This map was developed by Child Care Resources Inc. (CCRI) in partnership with NC Child Care Resource & Referral and the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education.
The number of licensed child care programs in the state decreased by 5.8% during the five years when providers were receiving pandemic-era stabilization grants, first from the federal American Rescue Plan Act and then partially continued by the state legislature.
That net loss increased to 6.1% between March 2025, when those grants ended, and September 2025. Family child care homes, licensed home-based child care programs, made up 97% of that net loss.
Advocates have called for child care investments since the pandemic brought increased costs and increased competition for employees. Providers were able to raise teacher wages with the infusion of stabilization grants. Without it, they are struggling to compete with retail and food service jobs. This leaves them stuck between increasing tuition for parents who cannot afford to pay more and losing teachers who cannot afford to make less.
The average cost of child care statewide is $10,481 per year, according to state data in the above map. The median wage for child care workers was $14.20 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Advocates say state and federal public investments are necessary to create a system that provides high-quality care and education at a price that is affordable to families.
Research has linked high-quality early care and education with higher academic, social, and economic outcomes for students and communities. In North Carolina, affordable, accessible child care could add up to 68,000 jobs, increase the state’s annual economic input by up to $13.3 billion, and boost its GDP by up to $7.5 billion, according to a 2024 report from the state Department of Commerce and nonprofit NC Child.
Child care access can be a make-or-break factor for student parents. Seventy-one percent of caregiving students nationwide reported that their caregiving responsibilities could lead them to dropping out of community college in the 2024 Community College Survey of Student Engagement.
The same survey found student parents were highly motivated to succeed. They were less likely than students without caregiving responsibilities to cite academic unpreparedness as a reason for stopping out. Caregiving students reported higher engagement across benchmarks like academic challenge, student effort, and student-faculty interaction compared to students without caregiving responsibilities. Caregiving students also reported higher GPAs than their non-caregiving peers.
Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt visits students at Kid Appeal Learning Center, a child care program in High Point. Liz Bell/EdNC
This is despite many factors that “could pose challenges to student engagement” — parent students were more likely to be older, to be women, to be first-generation, to be Pell-eligible, and to be working 30 hours or more per week compared to non-caregiving students.
Student parents who persist through a credential or degree are more likely to attend colleges that provide child care supports like full-time care, drop-in care, or subsidies — as well as support with basic needs — than student parents who drop out, according to New America research from 2023.
The same research found child care services like full-time and drop-in care could be the convincing factor for a little over half of students surveyed who stopped out to come back to school. Free tuition was the top factor, with 72% of student parents reporting they would return if the cost of tuition was covered.
EdNC has identified three primary ways community colleges can strengthen child care access and affordability: providing on-campus child care, utilizing the state’s child care grant program, and expanding the early childhood workforce, including through child care academies.
Providing campus-based child care
Community colleges across North Carolina are supporting student parents’ child care access, from hosting full-time, on-campus centers to providing drop-in and after-school options.
Colleges have fewer on-campus child care options than they used to. According to EdNC’s analysis of federal data, 29 community colleges in North Carolina offered dependent care on campus in 2004.
In May 2025, there were 17 colleges offering on-campus child care, according to EdNC’s analysis. Twenty-one colleges had closed on-campus child care, and 20 had never operated on-campus child care, based on what our analysis was able to document.
The on-campus child care programs that remain vary in their design — from operating hours to funding sources and populations served — but can provide starting points for colleges looking to expand access in their regions.
Thirteen of the 17 colleges providing on-campus care are 5-star licensed centers. Three are Head Start programs, and at least five offer NC Pre-K.
An infant at Haywood Community College’s Regional Center for the Advancement of Children. Liz Bell/EdNC
According to EdNC’s analysis, five child care models exist at community colleges across the state:
- Licensed, on-campus child care, currently provided at 13 community colleges;
- Both licensed, on-campus child care and drop-in care, currently provided at Cape Fear Community College (operating both) and Forsyth Technical Community College (operating a lab, outsourcing drop in care to a local provider, and providing care for particular on-campus events);
- Head Start, currently at Blue Ridge Community College, Halifax Community College, and Lenoir Community College;
- After-school and drop-in care, currently provided at Sandhills Community College; and
- Drop-in care, currently provided at Central Carolina Community College.
The programs braid parent tuition, along with federal, state, and local private and public funding streams, to operate their programs.
They simultaneously support student parents and their children. Kids on Campus, a national effort to expand on-campus Head Start programs from the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) and the National Head Start Association (NHSA), says providing child care to community college students can have lasting, two-generation effects.
“Two of the most effective strategies for reducing poverty,” says a March 2025 Kids on Campus report, “are providing high-quality early childhood education for young children and supporting parents through education and training that will advance their career goals.”
Full-time, formal child care centers are not the only strategy available to colleges. They also do not always meet the needs of parenting students, according to New America’s research. Colleges should consider options like drop-in care, after-school care for older children, and financial support for off-campus options that work with students’ schedules like family child care homes or informal care arrangements with family and friends.
Drop-in care, which in North Carolina is limited to four hours per day, can provide more flexible options for students needing irregular or unpredictable care. Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) launched its drop-in care model in 2023 at no cost to students. The program is partly funded through a grant from the New Hanover Community Endowment, created by the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant Health in 2020.
A teacher helps a student with writing at Cape Fear Community College’s drop-in child care program. Liz Bell/EdNC
The program has since moved to a more accessible location for children on campus and doubled the number of children it can serve at once from 20 to 40 students.
In 2025, CFCC President Jim Morton told EdNC that he offers this advice to other community college leaders:
You’re here to serve a community, and to educate and train them so they can have a livable wage and a higher standard of living… Child care is really a big challenge and, next to financial need, that was always one of the higher needs… There are so many issues and other reasons for students to drop out, and so when we find them, we try to pick them off where we can.
— CFCC President Jim Morton
Parents’ child care needs do not stop when young children enter school. At Sandhills Community College, school-age children of students and staff can attend after-school programming through an on-site partnership with Boys & Girls Club of America.
Students also often need evening or weekend care. Additionally, students might need or prefer access to family child care homes, which are more likely to meet those needs at irregular hours, and family, friend, and neighbor care.
Asking students about their caregiving roles and needs is a crucial first step in supporting parenting students, the New America report found. Then, colleges should use those insights to design their approaches both for direct service provision and financial support.
Utilizing the state’s unique child care grant program
Child care costs make it harder for student parents to afford college. Research from EdTrust, released in September 2025, provides a new way for colleges and policymakers to think about affordability by including costs outside of tuition, including child care.
In 2019, the organization’s research “dispelled the myth that a student can still work their way through college in a minimum-wage job.” Then the organization decided to look at the finances of student parents, aiming to calculate “the actual annual cost of pursuing a degree.”
In North Carolina, child care and other costs like housing and transportation mean community college parenting students pay, on average, $16,700 more per year than their non-parenting peers.
Krystle Malcolm, a student at Cape Fear Community College, picks up her 3-year-old son, Mavryk, from drop-in child care. Liz Bell/EdNC
When taking into account these costs relative to student income and other grant supports, the average affordability gap for student parents in the state is $19,645, which would require 54.2 hours of work per week at minimum wage to close. That’s compared to an affordability gap for non-parenting students of $2,993, which would require 8.3 hours of work per week at minimum wage to close.
North Carolina is one of only five states that allocates funding for child care grants for community college students.
In 2024-25, the state allotted just over $3 million for the North Carolina Community College Child Care Grant, distributed across all 58 community colleges. Each college received a base $20,000 allotment, plus $10.16 per full-time equivalent student the college was budgeted to serve. Eighty-four percent of the funding was spent, up from about 77% in the 2023-24 year. The average grant award was $3,726.34, and 737 students received funding.
Not all of the funding was used in the 2024-25 fiscal year, but $211,000 more in grant funding was disbursed than in the previous year.
The grants can help students pay for licensed or unlicensed care from individuals or organizations. Grant funds can cover the cost of child care provided by nannies, relatives, after-school programs, and licensed and unlicensed providers, but not parents themselves. Students must provide an invoice after child care services are provided that passes “a reasonable test for cost.”
Colleges are supposed to work with local social services agencies that distribute child care subsidy funding to coordinate aid for students. Colleges should not require official documentation of students’ subsidy application and denial if it creates a barrier or is too time-consuming, Brenda Burgess, associate director of student aid at community college system, told EdNC.
The timing of the state budget and the reimbursement model make it challenging for colleges to get all available funds to student parents. For example, when a budget is not passed by the time classes start in August, community colleges do not receive the grant funds until after the semester begins. Once they do, some parents have made other arrangements. A community college system grant report said the delays cause some students to postpone enrollment.
The same report states that having to reimburse students or providers after services are given creates challenges. Students often cannot afford to make up-front payments, even if reimbursed down the line, and child care providers rely on timely payments.
Some colleges are tweaking policies and taking advantage of the grant program’s flexibilities to ensure the grants reach the students who need them and do not cause unnecessary stress for students, providers, or college staff. Read more about how colleges can make the grant work best:
Training child care teachers, launching academies
Community colleges do not just support the child care needs of their own students. They also expand child care capacity by serving as the main sites for the education and training of the early childhood workforce, including child care professionals.
There were 5,524 students enrolled in the early childhood education curriculum program across North Carolina community colleges in fall 2024, up 5% from the year before and nearly reaching pre-pandemic enrollment levels.
North Carolina is home to several programs that provide financial assistance to early childhood professionals looking to further their education, most often at community colleges. TEACH scholarships, from the nonprofit Early Years, assist child care teachers with the cost of tuition for associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. Child Care WAGE$, from the same organization, provides wage supplements for child care teachers based on their education level. Early childhood apprenticeships, expanded and financially supported by a recent effort called Building Bright Futures, provide pathways for new and seasoned early childhood teachers to work and go to school at the same time while increasing their compensation.
PlayWorks teacher Angela Foster engages students during a fire drill. Liz Bell/EdNC
Beyond providing multiple early childhood curriculum programs, community colleges also offer alternatives for individuals to receive the North Carolina Early Childhood Credential, which is required to be a lead teacher in a licensed child care classroom.
With the industry struggling to recruit teachers, fast-track options called “child care academies” emerged in the last two years as another quick and affordable option for individuals interested in working in child care.
In September 2025, EdNC found at least 11 of these academies operating across the state, which prepare teachers through anywhere from 20 to 64 hours of class time to enter the classroom at little to no cost to the participant. These models were started and operated by a combination of community colleges and local early childhood organizations like Smart Start partnerships and Child Care Resource & Referral (CCR&R) agencies. Most were partnerships between at least two of these institutions.
These academies differ depending on local priorities. Some academies, which EdNC’s analysis described as the “classroom-ready model,” give individuals what they need to start working in the classroom, including providing basic health and safety training and covering criminal background checks required to work in licensed settings.
A second approach to these academies, described by EdNC’s analysis as the “teaching credential model,” takes the basic training from the classroom-ready model and adds coursework from EDU 119, the introductory early childhood community college course. This model gives teachers a continuing education credit (EDU 3119) that they can then build upon at any community college and provides teachers with the credential required to be a lead teacher.
In December, the state Division of Child Development and Early Education, under the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, announced partnerships with 16 institutions of higher education — 13 of which are community colleges — to launch new child care academies. Each institution is expected to operate at least three academies through July 2026. The models are funded through the federal Preschool Development Grant.
“North Carolina’s early learning system depends on a strong, well-prepared workforce, and the Child Care Academies are designed to meet that need head on,” said DHHS Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Michael Leighs in a press release. “By providing free high-quality training, we’re opening doors for new educators while supporting families and ensuring children across our state have access to safe and nurturing care.”
The following colleges received funding to start academies:
- Appalachian State University
- Bladen Community College
- Central Carolina Community College
- Central Piedmont Community College
- Davidson-Davie Community College
- Durham Technical Community College
- Elizabeth City State University
- Forsyth Technical Community College
- Guilford Technical Community College
- Montgomery Community College
- Nash Community College
- Pitt Community College
- Roanoke-Chowan Community College
- Sandhills Community College
- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Wilson Community College
Shifting culture
The New America research project of 10 community colleges’ approaches to supporting parenting students’ child care needs led to recommendations for colleges and for state and federal policymakers.
In addition to models like on-campus care and subsidies, the project recommended several ways to integrate child care and family-friendly policies into colleges’ overall approaches.
Colleges, the researchers write, should include child care when writing their strategic plans and equity goals. They should collect data on students’ caregiving roles and needs. And they should consider centralizing child care services and/or coordinating with student services like housing referrals, food assistance, and transportation help.
“Such models ensure parenting students aren’t left to piece together services on their own,” the report says. “They address the reality of time poverty and can improve retention and completion.”
The report references Forsyth Tech’s SPARC (Student Parent Advocacy Resource Center) as an example of a one-stop shop that improves student parents’ experiences accessing several kinds of support.
Maya Clay, a Forsyth Tech student parent EdNC interviewed in 2024, said the support of SPARC and Shanta Reddick, director of Forsyth Tech Cares and adult learner success, “was like hope brightening my future.”
“Being able to have somebody in your corner, who just wasn’t there to support you financially but emotionally, and like making sure you’re successful, and being able to link you to other resources, makes being a student parent here so different,” Clay said.
Posters created by student parents during a focus group at Forsyth Technical Community College. Liz Bell/EdNC
Partnering with early childhood support organizations and adopting family-friendly policies make a difference in campus culture and student success, according to the New America research project.
In North Carolina, some colleges are co-locating or partnering with Smart Start partnerships and CCR&R agencies. These organizations’ staff have expertise in connecting parents with child care options and other family resources.
Forsyth Tech’s Reddick has a close relationship with a local CCR&R coordinator, which, the New America report found, facilitates “warm hand-offs and personalized referrals.”
Bladen Community College (BCC) is using a former elementary school to co-locate Bladen Smart Start’s headquarters and the college’s culinary and agribusiness programs. Additionally, four classrooms have been set aside with future plans for child care for the children of parents.
The effort is the result of collaboration between BCC, the Bladen County Board of Commissioners, Bladen County Schools (BCS), and Bladen Smart Start.
The New America research says family-friendly policies beyond child care are also important, including virtual options for students when child care arrangements fall through and clarification on when children are welcome on campus.
In addition to providing after-school care for students’ families and community members, Sandhills Community College is also the only community college in the state designated a Family Forward employer, a certification workplaces receive when their policies reflect best practices in early childhood and family well-being.
The certification, the effort’s website reads, “is not just a badge. It’s a marker on your journey to create a family friendly workplace, and sends a clear message: you care about your employees, their families, and their children — the future workforce of North Carolina.”
Sandhills has prioritized creating a family-friendly workplace by providing after-school and drop-in care, paid parental leave, flexible work options, among other policies.
“Invest in your employees, their values, and their families, and they’re going to work harder for you. It’s a pretty simple concept,” said Taylor McCaskill, the college’s senior director of workforce development and corporate partnerships, as reported by Alexandra Quintero.
Sandhills also has plans to open a Center for Excellence in Child Care through a partnership between the college, Partners for Children & Families (the local Smart Start partnership for Moore County), Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust, and the Moore County Chamber of Commerce.
The project, which is still in the fundraising stages, would renovate two buildings. One would be a high-quality child care program to serve the neighborhood and act as a lab school for community college students studying early childhood to observe best practices and gain hands-on experience in the classroom. The second building would house both early childhood faculty from the community college and the staff of Partners for Children & Families. Co-locating the staff would help to provide coordinated wrap-around family support, said Stuart Mills, executive director of Partners for Children & Families.
Mills emphasized that the project is born out of an ongoing, close partnership between the organization and the college, and is just one example of the ways they collaborate. Smart Start staff provide training at the local child care academies, some of which are housed at the community college. Two members of the college staff serve on the organization’s board of directors. And both Partners for Children & Families and the college are leading members of the local Chamber of Commerce’s Child Care Task Force, which is working on long-term child care solutions for the entire community.
Community college faculty and leaders are participating in similar local task forces across the state. The task forces are often hosted and convened by chambers of commerce.
Community colleges have a role in advocating for systemic solutions, writes Stephanie Baker, one of the New America researchers.
“By supporting early education advocacy in their communities, they can help secure the child care infrastructure that both parenting students and their employees need,” Baker writes.
When community college child care efforts are supported by outside funding, they can be powerful tools for colleges in their roles as employers, as educational institutions, and as community anchors, state leaders say. Utilizing the capacity of educational institutions, including community colleges, is part of the approach of the state task force working on long-term child care solutions that strengthen families and the state economy.
Samantha Cole, child care business liaison at the North Carolina Department of Commerce, said the task force has found that these efforts are working well for those participating, but are “hyper-localized” in funding source, design, and reach.
Cole said more peer-to-peer collaboration between colleges could help scale effective approaches to other communities.
“It’s not like you’re hearing that there’s a ton of external communication about the successes of these projects and programs,” Cole said at the December meeting of the task force. “We’d certainly like to see more of that. We think it might help encourage other campuses.”
Editor’s note: This article includes previous reporting by Mebane Rash, Katie Dukes, and Sophia Luna.
This article first appeared on EdNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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