Researching food and housing insecurity among America’s college students: lessons learned and future steps

ABSTRACT

College and university faculty, staff, and administrators are increasingly aware that their student body is experiencing basic need challenges including food and housing insecurity. As a result, a small but developing body of literature is emerging that documents the prevalence and implications of food and housing insecurity among college students. This paper describes three unique efforts, offering insight and recommendations to institutions or researchers considering undertaking similar studies. Drawn from the experience of three sets of researchers, this paper describes the history, studies, experiences, and lessons learned from their research into college student food and housing insecurity and homelessness. The paper also presents recommendations for future research in the area of postsecondary student basic need insecurities.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• food insecurity
• housing insecurity
• college students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathi Trawver, Ph.D., LMSW is a Professor in the University of Alaska Anchorage School of Social Work. Her research focuses on the intersections of serious mental illness, homelessness, criminal justice contact, interpersonal and family violence, and basic need security.

Katharine M. Broton is an assistant professor of higher education and sociology (courtesy) at the University of Iowa. She is a faculty affiliate of the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice and the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education. She uses multiple methods to examine the role of poverty and inequality in higher education as well as policies and programs designed to minimize related disparities and promote college and socioeconomic success.

Jennifer Maguire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at Humboldt State University. She works collectively with students, scholars, practitioners, and community leaders on a variety of innovative research and projects aimed to transform how students' basic needs are met in the California State University (CSU), as well as inform state policy being redesigned to better serve students in higher education.

Dr. Rashida Crutchfield is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach. She is an advocate committed to amplifying the voices of marginalized communities through research and service. Her areas of practice and research focus on student homelessness in higher education, basic need security for students, and social work community practice.

Notes

1 I also pursued extant datasets to analyze, including national household studies, but soon realized that the limitations of those research designs were too large to provide meaningful prevalence estimates for undergraduates (Broton, 2017; Broton, Canedo, et al., 2018; Goldrick-Rab & Broton, 2017).

2 The latest Hope Center survey on basic needs insecurity included 66 institutions in 20 states and the District of Columbia (Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, Schneider, et al., 2018). For more information on how to participate, visit hope4college.com. Recently, Diverse Issues reported that the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) will add food insecurity measures to future iterations of the survey (Elfman, 2019).