https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3285-9816
Background
Awareness of food and housing insecurity among students in higher education is growing in the United States. Research at four-year universities has shown that between 5.4% and 10.9% of students experience homelessness at least once in a 12-month period (Crutchfield, Citation2016; Crutchfield & Maguire, Citation2018; Silva et al., Citation2017) and 40%−52% experience housing insecurity (Silva et al., Citation2017; Tsui et al., Citation2011). Studies suggest that community colleges have even higher rates, ranging from 30% to 50% of students experiencing housing insecurity and 13% to 14% experiencing homelessness (Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, & Hernandez, Citation2017; Wood, Harris, & Delgado, Citation2016). Research conducted with college students found that between 21% and 52% of students experienced food insecurity including reduced intake of food, nutritional deficits, and/or worry about having access to enough food (Chaparro, Zaghloul, Holck, & Dobbs, Citation2009; Crutchfield & Maguire, Citation2018; Freudenberg et al., Citation2011; Goldrick-Rab, Broton, & Eisenberg, Citation2015; Martinez, Maynard, & Ritchie, Citation2016).
Shifting student demographic characteristics and increased economic constraints have exacerbated pressures, making it difficult to complete degrees and leverage the advantages of higher education (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Citation2018). “Non-traditional” students now constitute the majority in higher education. Students are now generally older, have dependents or other caregiving roles, and are more likely to be attending school part time due to the necessity of working. Balancing increasing and competing demands of everyday home, work, and school life, students are making sacrifices to attend college that have a number of impacts on health and wellness, educational success, occupational opportunity, and overall material stability.
Overview
The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness is to raise awareness about the food and housing disparities that college and university students are facing and highlight innovations in research and practice emerging on our nation’s campuses. This collection of articles intends to initiate and sustain a conversation about who our students are, understand how systemic social problems and everyday life circumstances shape the ability to access and complete higher education and identify ways to better support students through degree completion and beyond.
The issue brings together voices from a diverse range of campuses. We approach questions of national relevance by highlighting challenges and identifying emerging patterns of innovation. While each campus faces its own challenges and opportunities, similarities in the student experience warrant consideration at a broader scale. The work of Katharine Broton, for example, reviews patterns and trends in the current literature related to housing insecurity and homelessness as a barrier to student success. She reports that community college students are at greater risk and argues that any student success and related campus policy initiatives must consider student housing circumstances as a central part of that effort. Similarly, Trawver, Maguire, Broton, and Cruchfield offer lessons learned from three regional campus efforts in Alaska and California to better understand and respond to student food and housing insecurity. They include recommendations for researchers in assessing institutional readiness and becoming engaged at the campus and community level.
In the face of these challenges, students continue to show up, persevere, and seek out opportunities through higher education. This is highlighted in the work of O’Neill and Bowers, who examine resilience in the face of housing disparities in a rural public university. Their work is situated in socio-ecological perspective and identifies individual, social, and institutional assets that contribute to student success. Similarly, the work of Khosla and colleagues highlight the fact that students continue to achieve their academic and professional goals in spite of experiencing a variety of everyday challenges and hardships. While the students in their research reported significant barriers to degree completion including caregiving obligations and work constraints, their stories are an important contrast to potentially self-reinforcing narratives of poverty and struggle at the institutional level. This has important implications at all levels of research, policy, and practice, because we do not want to unintentionally reinforce what we are trying to alleviate.
While the experience of food and housing insecurity among students in higher education varies across campuses and regions, there are important similarities that become apparent as researchers, campus leaders, and students begin talking to one another and sharing efforts underway at their respective institutions. Carmel Price and colleagues describe efforts across 16 campuses in Michigan to develop a food pantry network. Common barriers to implementation included infrastructure and institutional support and the challenges of operating within a university system generally. Similarly, the work of Rashida Crutchfield and Jennifer Maguire detail student perceptions of and experiences with a campus emergency response program. In addition to raising important questions concerning student outreach and campus awareness, it demonstrates what can happen when institutions commit to student success. Finally, inspired by Crutchfield’s research (Crutchfield, Citation2016), Trawver and Hedwig report results of a pilot study to assess food and housing insecurity at an open enrollment university in Alaska. The research has prompted a series of campus-wide efforts to engage students, faculty, and university leadership in a broader set of conversations about student success.
Implications
The study of food, housing, and financial insecurity in higher education has come to the forefront in the past ten years, grounding a national movement to address the needs of students who strive to attain their personal and educational goals through attendance at colleges and universities. As a whole, this issue is both a review of existing work and an invitation to broaden our communities of practice as we seek to build more inclusive and accommodating institutions of higher learning. It draws together a national perspective to support the framing of the development of national, state, local, and campus policies to best support the needs of students in higher education who experience homelessness, housing insecurity, and/or food insecurity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Rashida Crutchfield http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3285-9816
References
- Chaparro, M. P., Zaghloul, S. S., Holck, P., & Dobbs, J. (2009). Food insecurity prevalence among college students at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Public Health Nutrition, 12(11), 2097–2103. doi: 10.1017/S1368980009990735
- Crutchfield, R. (2016). Serving displaced and food insecure students in the CSU. Long Beach: California State University Office of the Chancellor.
- Crutchfield, R. M., & Maguire, J. (2018). California state university office of the chancellor study of student basic needs. Retrieved from http://www.calstate.edu/basicneeds
- Freudenberg, N., Manzo, L., Jones, H., Kwan, A., Tsui, E., & Gagnon, M. (2011). Food insecurity at CUNY: Results from a survey of CUNY undergraduate students. New York: The Campaign for a Healthy CUNY.
- Goldrick-Rab, S., Broton, K., & Eisenberg, D. (2015). Hungry to learn: Addressing food and housing insecurity among undergraduates. Wisconsin HOPE Lab with the Health Minds Study, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Single Stop. Retrieved from http://wihopelab.com/publications/Wisconsin_hope_lab_hungry_to_learn.pdf
- Goldrick-Rab, S., Richardson, J., & Hernandez, A. (2017). Hungry and homeless in college: Results from a national study of basic needs insecurity in higher education. Wisconsin HOPE Lab with the Association of Community College Trustees. Retrieved from http://wihopelab.com/publications/hungry-and-homeless-in-college-report.pdf
- Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (2018). Understanding the new college majority: The demographic and financial characteristics of independent students and their postsecorndary outcomes. Briefing Paper, IWPR#C462. Retrieved from https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/thhedwig%40alaska.edu/KtbxLwGkJJJlWzHGDTvXmjCbsccGwvWCbq?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1
- Martinez, S. M., Maynard, K., & Ritchie, L. D. (2016). Student food access and security study. Oakland: University of California Global Food Initiative.
- Silva, M. R., Kleinert, W. L., Sheppard, A. V., Cantrell, K. A., Freeman-Coppadge, D. J., Tsoy, E., … Pearrow, M. (2017). The relationship between food security, housing stability, and school performance among college students in an urban university. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice, 19(3), 284–299. doi: 10.1177/1521025115621918
- Tsui, E., Freudenberg, N., Manzo, L., Jones, H., Kwan, A., & Gagnon, M. (2011). Housing instability at CUNY: Results from a survey of CUNY undergraduate students. New York, NY: Healthy CUNY Initiative, City University of New York. Retrieved from https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/Center%20for%20Human%20Environments/cunyhousinginstability.pdf
- Wood, J. L., Harris III, F., & Delgado, N. R. (2016). Struggling to survive, striving to succeed: Food and housing insecurities in the community college. San Diego, CA: Community College Equity Assessment Lab (CCEAL).