AMERICA'S ROAD TO REVOLUTION
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THE AMERICAN THINKER.com
One in eight community
college students in the United States are homeless
By Bryan Dyne
31 March 2017
31 March 2017
A new study by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab has
revealed that about half of community college students in the United States,
which make up 46 percent college students in the country, do not have
consistent housing and that 13 percent are homeless. In absolute terms, this
means at least one million people trying to receive postsecondary education do
not have a roof over their heads.
These results confirm and expand upon previous
studies that have looked at college student homelessness, including earlier
work by the HOPE Lab and studies done by the College and University Food Bank
Alliance.
This estimate is an order of magnitude higher
than the official homeless statistic of the US, which is 0.5 percent of the
population, and more than twice the rate of youth aged 10-19 which face
homelessness at least once during a year, which is just under five percent. It
is also more than 29 times the official student homelessness rate recorded by
the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), which is the only federal body
that collects data on homeless students.
In order to clarify the
disparity between the official statistics and the HOPE Lab survey, the World
Socialist Web Site spoke to the Wisconsin HOPE Lab founder, Sara
Goldrick-Rab. She noted that “The FAFSA is notorious for undercounting homeless
students. First, students have to fill out the FAFSA, which many do not.
Furthermore, since a homeless student counts as being financially independent,
and thus is eligible for more money, FAFSA requires that they fill out a large
amount of paperwork, essentially to prove that they are homeless. Since we just
asked the students themselves, we captured a much better picture of the
problem.
“Even our results, however, are undercounting
the problem. Since it’s a voluntary survey, we are going to miss some people.
We also do not count things like couch surfing as being homeless because that’s
often considered something which college students just ‘do’. As a result, we
include that in our housing insecurity statistics, which includes about half of
all community college students.”
The latest HOPE Lab survey is the most
widespread study of homelessness amongst college students and, according to the
research done by the authors, is likely the only study that looks specifically
at the plight of community college students.
One of the few comparable studies was
done by the California State University (CSU) system, which included more
students but only looked at California schools and achieved its estimates based
on interviews with CSU staff, faculty and administrators rather than asking the
students directly.
In contrast, the Wisconsin HOPE Lab sent a
survey to more than 750,000 students across the country with a monetary
incentive to garner participation. The final survey response was 33,934
students, making it the largest national study which focuses on food and
housing insecurity among college students to date. While the nature of the
study does not immediately lend itself to broad generalizations, the agreement
between this study and all other studies looking at hunger and homelessness on
US campuses suggests that the data collected do represent trends throughout all
50 states.
One thread which supports this hypothesis is
that housing insecurity, which includes the inability to regularly pay
utilities or rent or the need to move frequently as well as those without a
permanent place to live, is not a problem isolated to urban or high-poverty
community colleges but a largely uniform problem across the areas studied.
Rural and urban community college students are equally likely to be housing
insecure, but homelessness is actually higher for those students living in
cities (15 percent) than those living in suburbs (14 percent), rural areas (11
percent) and small towns (9 percent).
Moreover, the data collected show that housing
insecurity is unrelated to things like eligibility for Pell Grants or
immigration status.
Of students ineligible for Pell Grants, 12
percent were homeless, compared to 16 percent for those who did receive a Pell
Grant. The difference in homeless rates between US citizens and permanent
residents was less than one percent. And while students who are African
American or Hispanic both were overrepresented among homeless undergraduates in
the study, the largest single racial category among homeless community college
students in the study is non-Hispanic white.
Even the cost of attendance, which includes
tuition as well as food, room and board, books, supplies and transportation,
does not greatly affect the rates of housing insecurity. The community colleges
studied with the lowest cost of attendance ($11,934 per year) had a housing
insecurity rate of 50 percent while the most expensive colleges ($26,563 per year)
had a housing insecurity rate of 46 percent.
The one factor that the study did find that
impacts the homelessness rate is whether or not a given student was a former
foster youth. Almost 30 percent of community college students among this
demographic who were surveyed are homeless.
Similar to the previous studies, which looked
primarily at the levels of hunger amongst college students, the current
research shows that working or receiving financial aid does not alleviate the
stress of finding adequate housing.
More than 40 percent of homeless students have a
job, and more than half of those work between 20 and 40 hours per week.
One-third of homeless students are receiving student loans. And, in another
indicator of the financial distress among these students, one-sixth of homeless
students are getting through college through credit card loans.
There is also little federal assistance for
homeless students. To quote the report, “among students experiencing housing
insecurity or even homelessness, less than 13 percent received any form of
assistance with housing costs, and only about six percent got assistance with
utilities. Even though 28 percent of students in this study have children, and
of those 63 percent were food insecure and almost 13 percent were homeless,
barely five percent received any child care assistance. Instead, the most
common forms of support these students received were tax refunds (likely from
the Earned Income Tax Credit) and Medicaid or public health insurance (e.g.,
via the Affordable Care Act).”
THE GIG JOB – In America, No Legal Need Apply
"Possibly most affected by this shift in the economy is the
Millennial generation, those aged 18-30. The report notes that more
than half of those under age 25 participate in independent work, not
just in the United States but throughout the European Union
as well."
AMERICA STUDENTS STARVE:
Report on the impact of
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS-TRUMPERNOMICS
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS
pounds America’s youth as they build a border to border Mexican welfare state
on our backs!
AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our
jobs!
The new reports show that in addition to
“traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these
teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling
drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat
properly.
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