It’s difficult to learn when you’re not sure where you’re going to sleep that night, as many college students know all too well. A recent federal report revealed that 8 percent of undergraduate and 5 percent of graduate students were experiencing homelessness. And in its fall 2020 survey, the Hope Center at Temple University found that nearly half of college students (48 percent) were experiencing housing insecurity, which could include the inability to pay rent or needing to move frequently. Such challenges can greatly reduce students’ chances of getting a degree while harming their health and well-being.
In 2014, Tacoma Community College, in Tacoma, Wash., partnered with the city’s housing authority to confront the problem in a new way: They created the College Housing Assistance Program, or CHAP, which offered housing-choice vouchers to students who were experiencing or at serious risk of experiencing homelessness. Those who completed the application process and managed to secure housing in Tacoma received a short-term subsidy meant to help them stay enrolled and get their degree. “This was a first — nobody had done this,” says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a prominent researcher and advocate for low-income college students.
CHAP received national recognition and was seen as a promising model for affordable college-housing programs. Then, in 2022, the Tacoma Housing Authority ended the program. But what lessons did the experiment leave behind that might help colleges better help their students?
Goldrick-Rab, a senior fellow at Education Northwest, is the lead author of a new report that offers some answers. In the researchers’ evaluation of CHAP’s impact, a key finding is that housing stability has significant potential to improve students’ wellbeing, but that partnerships between community colleges and housing authorities won’t succeed without sufficient staffing and support to help students navigate the voucher process.
Goldrick-Rab recently spoke with The Chronicle about the challenges of confronting housing insecurity — and the importance of looking at a broad array of outcomes when evaluating the impact of basic-needs intervention.
What’s the first thing people should understand about homelessness and housing insecurity among the nation’s college students?
We have data from a lot of different surveys that suggest that the broader issue of housing insecurity, which can put you at risk of homelessness, could be affecting as much as 50 percent of community-college students. Housing is the single biggest cost of attending college for them. They are really, really struggling with this.
We’ve increasingly acknowledged that it’s a problem, but most people say it’s just too hard to do anything about it. Faculty can’t pay rent, staff can’t pay rent. So how in the world can we really help college students? Most of the programs that we’ve seen in this space have been really small. They’ve helped, like, four or five students, maybe 10. Or maybe 20 or 30 over the entirety of the program. And these programs are boutique — they’re very intensive, very expensive, on a per-student basis. And most of these programs are about providing emergency housing.
The federal government’s housing-choice voucher program is meant to help low-income families secure housing in the private market. CHAP was designed to enable college students to do the same. But just one in four students admitted to the program ended up using a voucher to secure housing. What explains that outcome?
Right, the idea is to help people achieve self-sufficiency and get out of subsidized housing, which is always the goal of these programs. In this case, it was giving housing vouchers to college students and seeing what the educational outcomes would be. And the big question is, wait, why didn’t more students use it?
The biggest, most important finding from this whole thing is that it is not enough to simply partner with your housing authority and offer students vouchers: You have to help them get and use the voucher. That’s a really important result for the basic-needs field, which is essentially telling people, “Hey, all we need to do is put one basic-needs staffer on campus, one person for 10,000- 20,000 people. And they’ll help with all of this.”
There’s a lot of description in this report about how overburdened the staff were, and how high the staff turnover was. That’s extremely common at community colleges, and it’s not a recipe for program success. It takes real staff time; therefore, it takes real money. And somebody has to commit to actually helping students use these vouchers, which means helping them navigate the housing market. Every student who wanted to get this help first had to do this application, get admitted to the program, then do the [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] application, then go to an orientation, then search for housing, then find it and secure it. The complexity of those steps shows you why a human would be needed.
What other findings struck you as important?
One thing that we illustrate is that the students who were the strongest to begin with were the ones who were getting the help. Students who had higher grade-point averages, despite basic-needs insecurity, were also the ones who were more likely to get the support. I’m not saying that getting the support created the higher GPA; I’m saying they had it to begin with. And that’s a problem.
It’s also the case that women just seem to get more support than men — period. And we’re seeing that across the basic-needs field. So it’s not enough to say we’re doing equity work by providing basic-needs support. They have to make sure that the basic-needs supports are as barrier- free as possible so that they don’t exacerbate inequity.
It’s striking that many students who managed to sign a lease did well in college: Two-thirds earned a credential, transferred to a four-year college, or remained on track to a degree. And students at risk of homelessness who secured housing graduated at a higher rate (57 percent) than at-risk students who didn’t (45 percent).
It’s true that this program did not seem to induce more people to graduate from college. On the other hand, if you look at who did get housing and how they did in college, there are these remarkably high success rates.
It’s really clear that if you get students housed, they have higher graduation rates. I cannot say for sure that that’s cause-and-effect, but it’s remarkable that 43 percent of the homeless college students who received housing graduated. That’s higher than the national graduation rate for community-college students (35 percent).
You looked beyond graduation rates to examine several other outcomes, including use of public benefits. For one thing, you found that after entering the program, students at risk of homelessness were much more likely to use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. What do these findings mean, and why do they matter?
We took a broader lens on what constitutes a good outcome for students, and that’s where I talk about the whole student’s success. We were able to surface aspects of a student’s life in the data that are typically not observed by colleges. If I had done this just using regular college data, I would have just known how they did in college.
Because I linked up data from Washington State’s integrated data systems, across multiple state agencies, I can tell you how many months a student received homelessness services from their county, which speaks to their costs. I can tell you that whether or not students got housing, they had reduced rates of food insecurity. Because we linked up to wage data, I can tell you that this program boosted the odds of students participating in the labor force — and they didn’t even have to get housing for that to happen. So, they were more likely to get a job.
I can also tell you, because a lot of these students had kids, that the program boosted the rates at which students got Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. And that means more cash in their homes for their kids.
And what does all of that tell you?
What that says to me is when we’re doing basic-needs work, we had better expand our lens and look at the returns beyond just education, because that’s not all that we’re trying to do here. Frankly, I think every community college should be evaluated based on these outcomes.
These are people — they’re not just students. So when we help them, we’re helping them in their lives, not just in the classroom. So it really looks like whatever navigational support students in the program did get, probably from a staff member, helped them do things like get a job more easily, even if they didn’t get into housing. To me, that says that you’re seeing the whole human. We hear people say all the time that community colleges are not social-service agencies, that they shouldn’t be doing this work. I’ve gotta tell you, I don’t think that’s true.
I think that community colleges are hubs where people connect to all kinds of things that help them in all kinds of aspects of their lives. And if we start counting that up, and especially if we double down on doing that work a little more, the return on investment is much, much bigger than we admit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.