While his wife was in labor in the hospital with their third child, Joshua Castillo was in the waiting room completing a computer science final and two quizzes.

By then he was accustomed to juggling the demands of fatherhood with the unyielding deadlines and expectations of college, where he is studying computer science while working full time and helping raise his kids — a responsibility for which he said he doesn’t get much sympathy from faculty.

“Most professors that I’ve come across are really in the mind-set of, this is your full-time job, this is all you have to worry about right now.”

Castillo is one of about 3.8 million students raising children while in college. More than two-thirds of those students — about 70 percent — are women, according to Education Department data analyzed by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. But about 1.1 million are fathers, who are often overlooked and face even longer odds of graduating.

“If student parents are an invisible population, student dads are ghosts,” said Autumn Green, who researches student parents at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

Sixty-one percent of student fathers drop out of college without degrees, compared to 48 percent of student mothers, the women’s policy research institute finds. Among single, Black and Latino fathers, the dropout rate is about 70 percent.

There’s been little attention paid to the dismal graduation rates of student fathers — despite alarm bells over the huge decline in the number of men overall who are attending and graduating from college.

Enrollment has dropped nearly twice as much for men as for women since the start of the pandemic, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and women now outnumber men in higher education by 59 to 41 percent.

“Further research needs to be done for us to be able to pinpoint why” so many men with children drop out, said Chaunté White, senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Castillo had his first child when he was 16. It’s been a rough go since then.

After changing high schools, getting expelled and dropping out, he earned a GED diploma. He took a few college courses, planning to join the military, but then decided that he might as well enroll full time in the hope of getting a job in cybersecurity. He was behind his classmates, and taking care of his sons sometimes got in the way of his studies. His mother, who had helped with child care, died last year.

He’s gotten assistance in the form of grants, tutoring and counseling from a nonprofit called Generation Hope that supports student parents and which he calls a “huge blessing.” But Castillo said that getting a higher education is probably the hardest thing he’s ever done.

“College is geared more toward the traditional student,” he said. “Not for nontraditional students like myself.”

Read the full article about student fathers quitting college by Lilah Burke at The Hechinger Report.