In a state marked by inequality and staggering housing prices, nearly 20% of community college students report experiencing homelessness
Last modified on Sat 2 Apr 2022 15.41 BSTt Long Beach City College, a nearly 100-year-old community college south of Los Angeles, at least eight students have been
Enrolled students who are homeless can sleep in their cars at LBCC’s Pacific Coast campus parking structure. Wesley knew that was not true: especially in California, simple “bad luck, bad timing”, could leave students unable to pay for a room. When family members she had been staying with in the Los Angeles area told her she could no longer live with them, she had “a little bit of money in the bank, not enough to get an apartment”, she said. If she went home to the Bay Area, where she did have a place to stay, she would not be able to go to class, and she would fail her courses.
Leeann studies for an exam on the kitchen table. ‘It’s hard to focus on your educational goals when you’re not meeting your basic needs,’ she said. “Homelessness has so many different faces to it,” Leeann said. “Someone sitting next to you, just because they look clean, and all that, doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing it.”For years, in part because of the stigma, homelessness among college students was “a hidden crisis”, said Rashida Crutchfield, an assistant professor at California State University Long Beach and a leading researcher on the issue.
Over the past decade, academic research documenting the extent of hunger and homelessness among college students has driven a transformation in how schools approach the problem, as researchersToday, virtually every public college in California has some kind offor students, according to Debbie Raucher, the director of education at John Burton Advocates for Youth, a California non-profit.
Many people have an “outdated” image of struggling college students as people barely out of their teens who “have to eat Top Ramen sometimes”, Raucher said. A more accurate image is someone like Patricia: “A single mom with two small children who’s trying to go to school to better her economic circumstances while managing childcare and transportation and employment and parenting.”
While college students experience homelessness for many different reasons, “it is still predominantly an economic challenge,” said Eric Hubbard, a development director at Jovenes, a non-profit whose program for getting students into housing has become a model across the state. “Housing is just so expensive.
“Most of the credit goes to our students,” Crutchfield said. “They have held our feet to the fire and done a lot of activism.” “I know some people will probably look at [the safe parking program] and say, ‘Why don’t you try to find these student homes?’ But it’s not that easy,” she said. It was helpful for students like her, she said, “just to have that stepping stone: ‘You’re safe for now.’”
Last semester, 1,200 LBCC students requested housing support from the school because of struggles to pay rent or keep up with bills, and 225 students were identified as “literally homeless”, Mendez said. So far this semester, the school has received 500 requests for housing support.
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