On the Path to Graduation, Life Intervenes

Now and then, when Laura Cherne would take out her food stamps at the grocery store or her Medicaid card at the hospital, she would catch someone looking at her askance, at her mixed-race child, at the bare ring finger on her left hand.

In moments like those, she liked to mention that she was going to nursing school. Telling people — and reminding herself — that she had been accepted to the rigorous program at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis eased some of her shame about living hand-to-mouth on public assistance, having a child with a man who was in and out of prison, and taking a path in life less stable than those of her childhood friends.

With the reference to nursing school, strangers saw her differently, says Ms. Cherne, 28. “It would shut them up.”

After high school, in 2005, she took a run at college, at Ball State University. But her parents wouldn’t co-sign a loan, she says, and within a few weeks, she had to leave. She worked menial jobs, suffered from persistent health problems, and hung out with her troubled boyfriend. She got pregnant, and he ended up back in jail.

Three years ago, with big hopes, Ms. Cherne decided to try college again. Today she has a full scholarship here at IUPUI, a 3.6 grade-point average, and a job as a peer mentor. But her margin is razor-thin. She shares a two-bedroom apartment with her 4-year-old son, Izayah, and her father, a recovering alcoholic with cerebral palsy. Her household budget is always in the red. Recently she learned that, compared with her general-education courses, the nursing program would require higher fees and more time driving back and forth to campus, threatening to sink her finances completely.

Low-income students are often one car breakdown, one illness, one unexpected mishap away from dropping out of college and not being able to return for a while, if ever. People fret about rising tuition, and much of the public dialogue about the cost of college — and many of the policy recommendations — revolve around those sticker prices. Yet the biggest barrier to poor students’ enrolling or staying in college is not tuition and fees, but everything else: rent, food, child care, gas, phone bills. Living costs represent more than 70 percent of the total cost of attending a two-year college, the College Board estimates.

In decades past, people without money just didn’t go to college, and they didn’t really need to. They could get decent-paying jobs and build careers with mere high-school diplomas. Today, jobs with even modest paychecks seem to require some kind of certificate or degree. And that means less-prepared, more-vulnerable students are showing up on campuses, bringing the struggles of poverty, homelessness, and hunger with them.

That didn’t used to be colleges’ problem. Now they’re grappling with how much it can and ought to be. More institutions are paying attention to how living expenses can affect or compromise a college career — not just in the spirit of charity, but in the self-interest of raising retention rates and maintaining tuition revenue. Just how far should a college go to support its neediest, most precarious students? A social-services role entangles faculty and staff members with students’ personal lives in ways that many institutions haven’t had to deal with before.

“Now that we have opened the doors to higher education,” says Cathy Buyarski, an associate dean for student affairs at IUPUI, “this is a societal issue that has come into the college environment.” Administering an emergency-grant program at the university, she sees students who have been kicked out of an apartment or have run out of money for food. Often they come to her at a breaking point.

“It’s not being able to plan ahead far enough to have a contingency plan,” she says. “It’s living on the edge.”

Despite support from mentors and peers at IUPUI, by last year the nursing program started to seem impossible to Ms. Cherne. Considering the extra expenses and demands on her time, she asked relatives if she could live with them. She plotted out how she might rely more on food pantries and other charities. Still she came up thousands of dollars short.

Sitting on a couch in her apartment, she pulls out a piece of notebook paper where she has tallied up her annual income and expenses. Her father’s disability checks, student financial aid, food stamps, and other income amount to about $24,500 per year. Her expenses ($800 a month for rent, $500 for food, and $170 for phone and Internet service, along with other costs) come to $24,900. In nursing school, the $5,000 per semester in financial aid — the lifeline that has to last six months — would be eaten away to only $300.

She already saves and scavenges wherever she can. “There is not one thing in this whole room that I bought,” she says. The table came from an elderly woman she helped move. The TV was a gift. The couch was discarded by a friend. “People who have money are kind of wasteful,” she says. “We’re resourceful.”

But thrift goes only so far. Ms. Cherne decided last year that despite her hard work, she wouldn’t become a nurse after all.

It’s well established by now that financial resources can determine a student’s fate. Low-income students with above-average eighth-grade test scores graduate from college at lower rates, researchers have found, than do wealthy students with below-average test scores. According to a report by Public Agenda in 2009, more than half of students who left college before graduating said they had done so because they needed to work to make money. More than a third said that even if a grant were to cover the cost of their tuition and books, they might not be able to re-enroll.

According to a Federal Reserve survey in 2014, a fifth of American adults had completed some college but had no degree. The two most common reasons cited, particularly among black, Hispanic, and female respondents, were family responsibilities and the need to work. But students who drop out without earning a degree generally have a harder time finding employment and more trouble paying off their loans. Those who put college on hold more than once, researchers have found, are much less likely to go back and finish.

In recent years, policy makers and colleges have put a lot of emphasis on giving incoming students an accurate picture of how much they’ll pay and how much that price might go up in the four (or more) years they’ll be enrolled. But there are no such estimates for escalating living costs, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor who studies education policy and poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In fact, she says, colleges too often downplay or ignore that piece of the puzzle.

Many colleges underestimate living costs by $3,000 or more per year, Ms. Goldrick-Rab has found, either because they haven’t kept up with rising rent and food prices in their areas or they are trying to make themselves look more affordable. Under federal guidelines, colleges can assume that students living at home have no living expenses, which is rarely true for those from low-income families.

As a consequence, some students fall short. “They pay their tuition because they have to,” she says. “When the money runs out, it’s their living expenses that run out.”

Last year Ms. Goldrick-Rab and her colleagues surveyed 4,300 students at 10 community colleges about housing and hunger. More than half of the respondents reported some level of food insecurity in the previous year, with nearly four in 10 having run out of food without the money to buy more. More than half of the students also reported some degree of housing insecurity, meaning that at some point they couldn’t pay rent or utilities. More than one in 10 had been homeless.

Many institutions don’t want to acknowledge that segment of their student populations, says Ms. Goldrick-Rab. In part, she says, college officials fear bad publicity associated with the cost of attendance. But that attitude could backfire: “We don’t want to repeat the mistake of the public schools that said, ‘Not our problem’ " when students showed up for class hungry, she says. If they go on to perform poorly, policy makers ask the schools why they’re not adequately educating students — and demand overhauls in education practices — when the more urgent issues might be outside the classroom.

With the support of some prominent nonprofit groups, more colleges now see helping students with living costs as a key part of their retention strategies. But the solutions are neither cheap nor easy, and don’t always grapple with the problems directly.

Beyond Financial Aid is the Lumina Foundation’s effort — research papers, webinars, workshops, other resources — to examine and ease the economic pressure on low-income students. The project points to promising programs, at Georgia State University and Middle Tennessee State University, for example, that award microgrants to needy students who are close to graduating. In the past four years, 7,000 students at Georgia State have gotten grants averaging about $900. The graduation rate for the 60 percent of students there on Pell Grants is higher than that of their peers, says Timothy M. Renick, vice president for enrollment management and student success.

But there’s a catch. Rules governing state money prevent the university from helping students with rent or car repairs, he says. “It is a challenge to address the noneducational costs.”

Some colleges have joined with nonprofit groups to try to channel public benefits and other support. Skyline College, a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area, teamed up with United Way to open a SparkPoint Center, which offers a food pantry and help with enrolling in public benefits such as health care, low-cost housing, and child care. Students can also meet one-on-one with financial counselors, who coach them on credit-card debt and building a budget. Since opening in 2010, the center has served 4,000 students in more than 30,000 meetings. “We are fully part of the college infrastructure in the sense that we report directly to the dean of counseling,” says Heather Smith, the program coordinator. “We are a retention strategy.”

At Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, administrators are adding support for low-income students bit by bit. On the Indianapolis campus, in an otherwise unused hallway closet, the college stores toiletries, cans of vegetables, and hundreds of boxes of macaroni and cheese, all donated by staff members and students. Ivy Tech also runs an emergency-aid program — about $25,000 a year, typically doled out in $200-to-$300 increments — to help students fix their brakes or replace their glasses. Those who have maxed out on financial aid, however, can’t get more money, according to federal rules.

Some years ago, Ivy Tech and Purdue University tried to start a center like SparkPoint, but the project fell apart, says Rachel Boon, executive director of retention and completion at Ivy Tech. The community college, with its 32 campuses, is pursuing partnerships with service organizations like Benefit Bank and Single Stop USA, which do similar work. “We know it’s a desperate need,” she says.

Ivy Tech has surveyed students who drop out, and the reasons are rarely academic. But needy students aren’t just victims of bad circumstances. They also make bad choices.

“I know that the national trends on teen pregnancy are in decline, but I will tell you, at the community college, it doesn’t feel that way,” Ms. Boon says. “We have a lot of 18- or 19-year-olds on child number two, trying to balance that part of their lives.” Personal responsibility is important, but the institution, too, has a responsibility. “You have challenges,” she says. “We’re here to help you out.”

About 30 percent of students in community college are parents — most of them women, and most of those women are single mothers. Finding affordable child care can be one of the biggest hurdles to staying enrolled. Some institutions, particularly in the Northeast and on the West Coast, offer subsidized child care, but spots are usually hard to get. Many cash-strapped colleges have had to cut such programs entirely.

Help for poor students doesn’t come just in the form of handouts, but also in life lessons. Here at IUPUI, administrators see some students in tough spots partly because of their own bad decisions, particularly related to spending.

“We are talking about students who have never really had access to money,” says Ms. Buyarski, the associate dean. “They don’t know how to budget, and they don’t know how to save.”

She recalls a student whose car broke down, so he went to a payday-loan service for money to fix it. Pretty soon he had taken out another loan to pay off the first. “He thought he was doing the right thing,” she says, “but he just wasn’t financially literate enough.” Ms. Buyarski provided him emergency aid on the condition that he get financial counseling.

About 40 percent of students here receive Pell Grants. Even though institutional resources are limited, Ms. Buyarski feels that kind of assistance is a moral responsibility for the college. “The folks I run with say, Yes, this is unfunded, but we need to figure this out.”

IUPUI has two new staff members to help. One is a part-time, unpaid intern from the social-work program who helps connect students with public benefits and other support. The other is a full-time financial coach, Brooke Williams, who started last summer. She counsels students not only on complicated financial-aid questions but also on personal financial crises.

Some students, not used to steady income, get their financial aid in a lump sum at the beginning of the semester. Pretty soon, Ms. Williams says, “it’s gone.” They spend it on clothes to “keep up with standards on campus,” or share it with family members who are desperate for money. When they come to her, she says, sometimes it’s too late to do much to help.

“You’re getting evicted on a Friday, and I am talking to you on a Tuesday,” she says, recalling some of her conversations with students. “That is not giving me much room to work with.”

Sometimes students turn to one another. When Laura Cherne’s car got a flat tire, a fellow student in her scholarship program came over to fix it. Her son, Izayah, wears hand-me-downs from classmates’ kids. Ms. Cherne, in turn, has helped classmates land babysitting jobs. The students support one another emotionally, too, she says. The challenges can be relentless.

“A lot of us in this little community have started to have anxiety issues,” Ms. Cherne says. “No matter how hard you are working at school and on your grades, money can absorb so many of your thoughts, if you’re worried about how your kid is going to eat or how you’re going to get to school.”

After she gave up on the nursing program, Ms. Cherne considered quitting college and trying to get a low-level office job. That would mean a meager but steady paycheck, more time with her son, and no studying until 2 a.m.

But she has decided to stay in college as an example to Izayah. Her new major is sociology, and she expects to graduate next year. She misses the adrenaline and surety of the nursing track, but she is intrigued by possible careers in art therapy or marriage and family counseling, a run-of-the-mill white-collar job, or something she hasn’t thought of yet.

Ms. Cherne has a hard time explaining her major to strangers, when even she doesn’t know where she’s headed. “To not know what that ending is,” she says, “that’s just a hard thing to adjust to.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.