Homeless students a growing concern

Some ‘food insecure’

DETROIT, June 27, (Agencies): Jennifer Carr knows she’s not the profile of a typical college student. The Detroit-area woman is 37 and has battled alcohol and heroin addiction. She’s also been homeless in the past and even now is categorized as someone who is precariously housed.

Carr’s story is not unusual. Studies suggest thousands of students at community colleges nationwide could be considered homeless or precariously housed, either because they have been thrown out of home, evicted, or sleep in a shelter, car or abandoned building.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go. I lived in my car. I didn’t have my job anymore and I got evicted from my apartment,” said Carr, who is in her first semester at Wayne County Community College District in Detroit. “I was ashamed I was living in my car.”

The few researchers who study the issue say there is scant data, but that they believe a surprisingly large number of college students are homeless. While some colleges have started to offer programs to help with housing or food needs, more needs to be done.

“For many people it’s a contradiction in terms — homeless college student,” said Paul Toro, psychology professor at Wayne State University. “If you’re a college student, you had to be with it enough to get yourself into college, so obviously you can’t be homeless.”

Carr

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor at Temple University, in Philadelphia, recently released a homeless national survey taken at 70 community colleges across 24 states.

“We’re the third study to find either 13 or 14 percent, so it’s consistent,” Goldrick-Rab said. “But at the same time, my bigger concern, and the thing that staggers me a little bit, is thinking this could be an underestimate.”

She also found that a third of the 33,000 students surveyed said they were “food insecure.”

Goldrick-Rab is concerned the numbers could be higher because electronic surveys are not the best way to reach students. Response rates were only around 5 percent.

Toro is doing similar research in Detroit, where so far he has found about 5 percent of Wayne State students are homeless or precariously housed.

“Take Wayne State’s student population of around 30,000 and take 5 percent of it, you know, it’s a lot of people,” he said, “So you’re talking about 1,500 students, roughly, at Wayne State.”

Goldrick-Rab said a reason why the problem may go unreported is perception.

“We have sort of had this attitude of like, ‘The kids are all right,’” she said, “We framed it as the solution, right, we framed it as you want to get out of poverty you go to college.

I think we falsely told ourselves, ‘Well you’d be out of poverty then when you went to college.’ You’re not, not until you complete the degree and often times not for years after that.”

Carr said the stigma needs to change.

LOS ANGELES:

Released

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Kendrick Bailey is standing outside the tent he has pitched on a filthy sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles and points to the American flag he served proudly during the Vietnam War.

“I didn’t have education back then,” says Bailey, recalling his time in combat. “So most of us shot guns. Sometimes you could see people get shot by guns. It was horrible.”

Bailey, who is in his sixties, is among an evergrowing population of veterans in Los Angeles who face challenges readjusting to civilian life and eventually become homeless.

“I never had a job,” he says, standing in the searing California sun on a recent day and struggling to explain his predicament.

Though friends initially would offer their couch, he said he quickly overstayed his welcome and got sucked into the same vicious circle facing many veterans who struggle with PTSD, unemployment, alcoholism, family issues, and end up on the street. Many have also served prison time. The infamous Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles that Bailey now calls home has the largest concentration of homeless people in America, many of them veterans with mental issues and battling addiction.

Their plight has been at the center of debate for decades in an America that loves to glorify its “heroes,” with successive administrations vowing to tackle the problem and pledging millions of dollars in assistance, including for housing.

But despite some 3,500 veterans finding housing last year in the Los Angeles area, recently released statistics serve as a sobering reminder of the scale of the problem.