Student Parent: The Fight for Families, the Cost of Poverty, and the Power of College
A vital call to disrupt systemic forces that impoverish families and to reimagine accessible higher education, empowering parents to thrive in college and at home.
Student Parent is about policy, a powerful testament to resilience, and an advocate’s guide for dismantling inequality. Nicole Lynn Lewis has an inspiring vision of an America where education is a right and generational wealth is accessible to all. This book shows us that investing in our student parents is a critical step on the path toward that bright future.
This book is a call to arms for anyone who believes higher education is not a luxury, but a fundamental right. It's for those who feel the pull to champion families pushed to the margins, to stand with them in their fight for a brighter future. It is an excavation of the past, a journey into the heart of how we arrived at this moment — how mothers and fathers in poverty became stranded so far from the shores of opportunity and economic mobility. And most importantly, it's a blueprint for the future, a roadmap for the work we must do to build a path toward lasting change.
— Nicole Lynn Lewis
Founder & CEO of Generation Hope
Author of Pregnant Girl and Student Parent
Our Founder & CEO Nicole Lynn Lewis, award-winning author of Pregnant Girl, returns with her second book — Student Parent: The Fight for Families, the Cost of Poverty, and the Power of College.
Her debut memoir, Pregnant Girl, earned national acclaim for its unflinching honesty and was celebrated by NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and The New York Times. Pregnant Girl was also named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2021. Student Parent is a searing yet profoundly hopeful investigation into the systemic obstacles that impede marginalized parents’ access to education, career advancement, and true economic mobility.
At its core, the book insists that investing in student parents is one of the clearest, most powerful steps we can take to break cycles of poverty and build generational wealth.