The Gates are Closing
Portland State is dismantling the programs that made college possible for student parents.
Summer Brother’s grandmother cleaned floors in schools. Her mother was told college was not for her. Summer was told the same. She came to Portland State anyway, where the ASPSU Children’s Center cared for her children while she studied, and where Baby and Little Vikings gave her family a place to belong. Higher education gave her a life she had been told was not hers to have.
Then PSU eliminated the ASPSU Children’s Center. Then Little Vikings and Baby Vikings were suspended. Then the university announced that Blackstone Hall, the last on-campus family housing, would be rebuilt as freshman-only dormitories. Families were not invited.
At last week’s President’s Town Hall, Summer stood at the microphone and named how this sequence of decisions impacted her: “I feel like a woman and a mother who ran through some closing gates, and I’m watching others behind me unable to have the same opportunities.”
Those others—single parents whose daily routine requires getting their children to the caregiver before rushing to class and whose long days of being a parent, a worker, and a student are made possible only with access to housing and daycare close to their classrooms—will no longer be able to call themselves college students.
Yet without irony, PSU’s Strategic Plan promises access and equity. Student parents are among those whom such commitments claim to serve: adult learners, often raising children, whose single disruption can end their education entirely. For them, childcare and affordable family housing are not amenities; they are preconditions for attendance. Remove them, and you remove the students.
Summer described watching a single mother arrive at PSU, excited to enroll, only to discover at the last moment that Baby and Little Vikings were gone. “I have not seen that woman again.” That woman will not appear in a retention report because she did not enroll. She is invisible to every metric PSU uses to evaluate itself. That is how an institution persuades itself that it is causing no harm.
For some women, college is not primarily a career investment so much as an exit from violence. Campus housing provides safety. Childcare makes attendance possible. A peer community replaces isolation.
A financially strained childcare program is a problem to be solved, not a program to be eliminated. Seismic retrofitting does not require converting family housing to freshman dormitories. These are not the only choices available. They are choices about whom the institution protects when resources grow scarce.
PSU must decide whether to again welcome such students or explain, in the language of contribution margins and strategic priorities, why it cannot afford to do so.