Nobody forced her to make these living arrangements that consume such a large percentage of her monthly salary. While it is regrettable, it's not the responsibility of the university to make sure that its students make good life choices.
Where did I say anything like that? I was just saying that $1700/month for rent is clearly above both the market rate for living with roommates, and above what she can reasonably afford given her salary.
Children living with unrelated adult roommates, or without their own bedroom (shared with siblings until age 10), is considered a strong indicator of poverty.
I expect a graduate student parent to be making significant material sacrifices to support a child (no big parties, no trip to Thailand in the summer) but they shouldn't be in poverty.
They are a student. As much as it sucks they have to support a child, this was a decision that they consciously made. We shouldn't have to throw around money to every grad student just because some small fraction of them are parents.
If you want to talk about programs specifically for supporting parents working towards their education, I'm all ears. But that is orthogonal to the current discussion.
Most grad 'students' work and should be paid as employees. They're not 'studying'. I really believe a grad student should be an employee and treated as such. They're doing the research which is directly tied to the university's ranking. The ranking and name of a university is tied to the applications they receive. They're the ones doing the grading and proctoring. They're not simply taking classes and graduating. They're writing papers and grants, meeting their deadlines for papers by not sleeping and then going to teach a session or grading all day. All while getting paid to work 'part time'.
Regarding being a parent, the alternative is singling them out, make the ones with children pass through hoops in order to receive extra financial support.
On a university, the funding will probably be limited. So now it's not only grad students that are parents but the grad students that are parents that did it early/qualified.
There's already a big discrepancy, even inside a single university, between how much each student earns based on their department/advisor/research.
