The Case for IES: How federal postsecondary data shaped California state policy and increased student parent supports

Few publicly available federal data sources provide detailed information about postsecondary students beyond race and income. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS)—administered by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES)—is one of the only nationally representative datasets that offers a comprehensive view of students’ college access, progress, degree completion, and employment outcomes. NPSAS includes critical insights about student populations often overlooked in other data collections, such as student parents. These details are essential to informing policies that help ensure all students have the supports to succeed.

IHEP spoke with David Radwin, a senior researcher at California Competes about how NPSAS data helped elevate the needs and experiences of student parents in California. Their research helped inform the state’s Greater Accessibility, Information, Notice, and Support (GAINS) for Student Parents Act. Enacted in 2024, the GAINS Act requires public colleges to provide comprehensive information about student parent services and resources, adjust cost of attendance and net price calculations to include dependent care, and collect data on this population.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Mr. Radwin: First, I want to make clear that my responses to your good questions are my reflections and opinions, no one else’s. Believe it or not, basic data on the number of student parents in California or nationwide are lacking. NPSAS revealed that these students represent almost 20 percent of all undergraduates, yet they’re often invisible in the policy development process. That count helped us make the case to lawmakers that these students deserve focus and attention in policy discussions.

We also learned that about half of student parents work 40 or more hours per week, and their financial aid often falls short of covering their needs because standard cost of attendance calculations often exclude essential expenses such as additional food, housing, and childcare.

The GAINS Act directly addresses this by requiring California public institutions to calculate and incorporate these extra costs and report statistics about student parents to our state longitudinal data system.

Mr. Radwin: We could not have conducted our research without NPSAS data, which allowed us to explore the student educational experience. While the American Community Survey can identify student parents, only NPSAS offers deep insights about their educational characteristics, such as their degree programs and how they pay for college. It shows us risk factors for stopping out of education, like delaying enrollment after high school or enrolling part-time, and offers a comprehensive view of financial aid, loans, grants, and debts.  This information is critical to designing better supports for student parents so they can graduate while working and caring for their children.

Mr. Radwin: Policymakers need to know that without NPSAS, many factors that inform student experiences would be invisible. For example, NPSAS data show that student parents borrow more and owe more on their federal student loans than non-parenting students. Losing these data means losing researchers’ and policymakers’ ability to track and address these disparities.

The threat isn’t just about the data collection itself, but also the tools we use to access it.  The online DataLab tool used by researchers to explore NCES datasets like NPSAS is starting to experience technical glitches on a regular basis. When it breaks, I can’t do the same research that I did just one year ago.

Mr. Radwin: My advice would be to just keep pushing in any way you can. As one example, I submitted a declaration in a lawsuit aiming to reverse funding and staffing cuts at the Department of Education. It explained how recent federal actions have affected my research. Many other education researchers have done the same. If those options are available, I encourage fellow researchers to share declarations as well.

Researchers can also amplify their concerns through op-eds and Letters to the Editor. One of my letters was recently published in The Mercury News and I plan to write more.

—