Lily Aronovitz is a student at the University of California Los Angeles and a summer intern at the Alliance.
Students experiencing homelessness are in uniquely vulnerable positions: they face burdensome expenses and deadlines that can limit their ability to both work and receive their degree. Colleges must better support their students with centralized systems that recognize the severity of student homelessness, and work to connect students with resources and programs suited to their needs.
The Current Landscape
The internet is rife with resources targeted towards students experiencing homelessness. These resources are often buried in convoluted webpages, are difficult to navigate, and are prone to long wait lists.
It is difficult for students experiencing homelessness to access the resources that may be most useful to them, or navigate to places that they can find these resources. If a school has a homeless response page on their site, it may unhelpful, rely on unfamiliar buzzwords, or demand that the student reach out to a laundry list of on-campus resources.
Even when neatly sorted by category, there are two main problems with this style of resource bank.
- Students must sort through and evaluate these resources themselves. Under the high stress of a housing crisis, sifting through resources consumes valuable time and energy, and can create further trauma. There is greater strain put on every involved entity when students must do their own outreach: they may not be familiar with which resources are best suited for them, and they will inevitably be met with some degree of mismatch or rejection.
- These resources are not centralized. Without communication between each independently-run organization or service, overlap can occur, resulting in an inefficient distribution of budget and labor. A school should not have multiple food pantries but no emergency fund to help students remain housed during an acute crisis (or vice versa). Additionally, when there is no central hub connecting these services, a school is unable to track the demand for services and the students who are using them. This data could be used for measuring demand, demographic information, and overall efficacy of the school’s response.
What Colleges Can Do
Colleges should take a page out of the homeless system’s coordinated entry book and centralize their resources. Students should have a well-known single landing point, often referred to as the “front door,” where they come with any concerns related to housing or basic needs insecurity. At the front door, an individual seeks to understand each student’s situation and provide them only with the resources that are suited to their needs. This pares down the quantity of information that students must sort through in times of distress. Capacity permitting, case managers may even be able to do some of this outreach for students, placing them directly into the programs for faster assistance.
Schools should work with local Continuums of Care to mutually expand their capacities, rather than duplicating services. For schools to match students to the right resources, they need to better understand what resources exist, and what each provider’s strength is. For example, a student club may run a convenient, on-campus food pantry, the school may be able to provide financial assistance, but neither may be able to provide housing vouchers like the local Continuum of Care.. Establishing this partnership also provides a pathway for colleges to advocate for their students’ needs, uplifting their challenges to community providers amidst the sea of other priorities that can drown individual stories.
Can Schools Be Expected to Function as Colleges, And as Homeless Systems?
Colleges are not reinventing the wheel.
Instead, they should build off of the homeless response system’s Coordinated Entry System model, implementing similar features of “front door” entry, case management, and data tracking. They can build partnerships and bring existing services into the system, rather than allowing individual programs or organizations to function in isolation. In the long term, this makes colleges’ homeless response both more efficient and effective.
Failing to sufficiently help students who experience homelessness prevents schools from delivering on their mission.
When students are most focused on where they are going to sleep at night, they can’t afford to focus on academic priorities. Students who are unable to complete their degree receive all of the debt and none of the benefits of higher education. Having a system in place to address homelessness among students is a key prerequisite to ensuring that students are in environments that are safe and conducive to their long-term success.
For colleges that tout values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, addressing homelessness is mandatory.
Homelessness disproportionately impacts students of color; Black individuals compose over 40% of the homeless population, despite representing only 13% of the general U.S. population. For the same minority groups overrepresented in homelessness statistics, bachelor’s degree attainment rates lag behind their white counterparts. Without a sufficient homelessness response to help students in need, schools are only perpetuating these disparities in higher education. In order to uphold missions of equity, schools must provide access to services that reduce these systemic barriers to academic achievement.
Yes, They Can
Over a 12-month period, an estimated 9% of college students are affected by homelessness. Colleges are all but self-contained communities, with a total enrolled student population triple that of Los Angeles, but a homeless population of approximately 1.1 million — 24 times that of the city’s already staggering numbers.
With these statistics in any other city, residents would demand better, so why don’t we hold our colleges to the same standard?
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