We remove barriers to education.
Young mothers looking to move beyond poverty face a conundrum: a college education is critical to creating a better life for their children. However, traditional educational settings do not typically accommodate busy mothers.
The Care Center’s supportive and creative environment is designed for busy mothers living in poverty. By incorporating child care, transportation, counseling, and medical care with a prep school educational model, our programs allow young mothers to concentrate on their studies.
Our focus on arts and humanities enables students to see how powerful they are and develop their own unique strengths. Young parents who graduate from The Care Center enter adulthood with valuable social and emotional skills. We help them achieve this, in part, by incorporating an approach called Creative Youth Development into our educational programming.
Read what our partner Mass Cultural Council has to say about the powerful impact of Creative Youth Development.
75% of our high school level graduates — all young mothers whose educations were previously interrupted — continue to college.
However, our work doesn’t stop there. Once young mothers enter college, it is common for family obligations, financial constraints, and lack of support to stand in the way of earning a degree. Single mothers in college are half as likely as non-parenting women students to earn a degree within six years.
Our onsite college, Bard Microcollege Holyoke, addresses this gap by combining a rigorous college program with supports designed for low-income mothers.
Our programs lead to a lifetime of benefits.
A 2018 report by The Institute for Women’s Policy Research states that a single mother with an associate degree will earn about $329,000 more working full time in her lifetime than she would with only a high school diploma and about $610,000 more with a bachelor’s degree. Single mothers with even some college experience are less likely to live in poverty. And they’re significantly less likely to live in poverty with a college degree.
Beyond economic gains, the benefits of a college education are quickly passed along to the next generation. According to the 2018 IWPR report, “The children of college-educated parents see improved behavioral and academic outcomes in childhood and are more likely to attend college themselves as young adults. In addition, those who receive high-quality early childhood education through an investment in child care for single student mothers would see well-documented benefits including increased future earnings and a reduction in crime.”
A college education even leads to healthier living. A report from Lumina Foundation describes the differences in healthy habits between those with a college degree and those without one. Educational achievement is correlated with not smoking, eating fruits and vegetables, exercising and wearing a seat belt.
A 2016 report by the Brookings Institute found that individuals with only a high school diploma have a mortality rate that is double those with some college or a college degree. According to the report, “An additional year of college decreases mortality rates by 15 to 19 percent by reducing deaths from cancer and heart disease.”
