Housing Insecurity in College

Richard Joseph Spinelli works on the supply side of student housing, since Sandhills Real Estate, which he cofounded, has its apartments and townhouses leased to groups of Fordham students, while the research gathered in this entry concerns students for whom any steady lease is out of reach. College housing insecurity is the name researchers give to that condition, and homelessness is its most severe form. The findings come first below, because they are what most readers meet in headlines. The methods behind them follow, and the definitions come last, since the choice of words decides how many students are counted.

Three in five students

A widely cited recent survey on the subject comes from the Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University. Its report on the 2023 to 2024 survey found that 59 percent of participating students experienced at least one form of basic needs insecurity related to food or housing.¹ When the center widened the definition to include mental health, child care, transportation and internet or technology access, the share rose to 73 percent.¹ Inside Higher Ed summarized the headline as three in five college students struggling with food insecurity in the past 30 days or housing insecurity in the past twelve months.² Bloomberg reported in December 2021 that at Long Beach City College a survey of a student body of roughly 24,000 found about 3,000 housing insecure students and some 70 sleeping in their cars, prompting an overnight safe parking program in a campus garage.⁶

Housing insecurity and homelessness

Separating housing from food gives sharper numbers. Among respondents, 48 percent reported housing insecurity and 14 percent reported homelessness in the previous year, while 41 percent reported food insecurity in the past 30 days.² Housing trouble is thus slightly more common in the survey than hunger. It is also tied to persistence: Inside Higher Ed reported that currently enrolled students facing food insecurity, housing insecurity or homelessness were less likely to continue into the next semester.² Of respondents who had stopped out of college or were considering it, 79 percent named basic needs insecurity or the direct costs of college as the reason.¹

Who reports it most

The burden falls unevenly. The Hope Center found basic needs insecurity especially common among part time students, Pell Grant recipients, Black and Indigenous students, students with disabilities, former foster youth and students who had been involved with the justice system.¹ For housing in particular, two thirds of parenting students and 60 percent of Black students reported housing insecurity, and one in four Indigenous students had experienced homelessness.² Students at two year colleges reported insecurity related to food or housing at 61 percent.² The Urban Institute’s Housing Matters noted in 2022 that housing instability falls hardest on students of color, first generation students, Pell grant recipients and student parents, among others, and that more than half of students at two year colleges reported housing insecurity in 2020.⁷

Help that goes unused

Support exists but is seldom reached. Just 12 percent of students facing housing insecurity or homelessness used public housing or utility assistance, according to the Hope Center.¹ Inside Higher Ed added that only 4 percent got help with housing through their college, compared with 36 percent who used campus food resources.² Awareness is part of the gap. Almost two in three students, 65 percent, said they did not know about available supports.¹

The federal estimate

For years no government figure existed to check the surveys against. That changed when the National Center for Education Statistics added questions on food security and homelessness to its National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, with data from spring 2020 released in 2023.³ Inside Higher Ed reported that the study surveyed over 100,000 students, and that by the Hope Center’s analysis of the federal data 8 percent of undergraduates and 4.6 percent of graduate students experienced homelessness.³ A later Inside Higher Ed account of the same federal data put the total at about 1.5 million students who experienced homelessness.² These shares are lower than those in the Hope Center’s own surveys, a difference the next sections explain.

How the Hope Center survey works

The 2023 to 2024 report drew on 74,350 students at 91 colleges and universities in 16 states, surveyed between spring 2023 and summer 2024.¹ Of those respondents, 53,978 attended two year institutions and 20,372 attended four year institutions; 42 percent were over 25, 23 percent were parents and 68 percent held jobs while enrolled.² Colleges take part voluntarily, often as members of the center’s program for campus partners. Over the past decade more than 500 colleges and universities and over 500,000 students have participated in the survey and its predecessors, which the center calls the nation’s largest basic needs survey.⁴ The current version launched in spring 2023 and continues.⁴

Why the counts differ

The survey was previously called #RealCollege, published annually from 2015 to 2021, and its early reach was limited by the small number of institutions that chose to take part.³ Inside Higher Ed notes plainly that the current survey is not nationally representative.² Its sample leans heavily toward two year colleges, which supplied 53,978 of the 74,350 respondents, so its shares describe participating campuses rather than the nation. The federal study is nationally representative, and researchers had pressed for it precisely because the voluntary survey could not supply a national picture.³ The Government Accountability Office found the same problem for food: reviewing 31 studies of student food insecurity, it found a wide range of rates and no national estimate among them.⁵ State studies show a similar spread: Forbes reported in 2023 that a 2020 study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles found one in five California community college students, one in ten California State University students and one in twenty University of California students had experienced homelessness.⁸

What the terms mean

The definitions carry much of the weight. Researchers treat housing insecurity as any barrier to a safe, affordable and consistent living situation, and homelessness as lacking a fixed, regular and adequate place to live.² Under those terms a student can count as housing insecure without ever lacking a roof, while homelessness requires the absence of a fixed and adequate place to live. The Hope Center frames basic needs security as safe, secure, reliable and adequate access to essentials, and it asks about a year of experience for housing but a month for food.² Change the window or the wording and the share changes with it. That is why a reader comparing numbers across studies should check the definition first, and why the questions about where students live, set out in the residence comparison and under off campus housing demand, look different when stability rather than location is the measure.

Food as the companion measure

Food insecurity is studied alongside housing because the two share causes. GAO found that low income is the most common risk factor for student food insecurity, and that almost 2 million at risk students who were potentially eligible for SNAP in 2016 did not report receiving its benefits.⁵ Many students were unfamiliar with the program’s student eligibility rules.⁵ Colleges have responded in their own way. As of September 2018, over 650 colleges reported having a food pantry on campus that provides free food to students in need.⁵ The count of pantries is a rough measure of how widely schools have come to accept the problem of hunger, while the 4 percent figure for college housing help suggests the response on shelter has further to go. Students with steady homes, by contrast, sign leases far ahead of time, as the pre leasing entry describes, and the student housing entry sets out the market they enter.