Insights

The Urgent Need to Address Student Housing Insecurity

Students without secure housing face high barriers to succeeding in or completing their studies, highlighting fundamental inequities in the higher education experience. Housing insecurity disproportionately impacts students of color, low-income students, as well as older students. Students may experience housing insecurity through circumstantial conditions (e.g. a student’s living situation becomes unsafe for several months) or, most commonly, private market-driven causes (i.e. rent spikes). A growing body of scholarship links housing insecurity to academic performance.

Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, now at Temple University, has led research efforts to highlight this critical topic. Her teams have surveyed thousands of students at two-year and four-year institutions across the country. They found that in 2018, 36% of students at four-year institutions and 46% of students at two-year institutions faced housing insecurity. 9% of four-year and 12% of two-year college students experienced outright homelessness.

Financial Aid & Costs of Living

While the principal drivers of student housing insecurity relate to the overall high cost of higher education, especially for low-income or first-generation students, specific institutional policies affect the problem as well. One important, yet less studied, factor is the method institutions use to estimate the costs of living off campus – which can negatively impact a student’s total aid package.

Generally, a student’s financial aid may not exceed the cost of attendance, typically calculated as the total of tuition, the estimated cost of living on or off campus, and additional fees. Colleges and universities are given broad latitude to estimate the cost of living as they see fit. Some colleges can feel incentivized to underestimate, as higher costs of living could cause a reduction in applications or a slide in national rankings. As a result, if a school underestimates local costs of living, then students in need may not receive the adequate amount of aid needed to cover basic living expenses.

Research Process & Findings

U3 Advisors sought to track each school’s estimated cost of living against market data of rents near each respective school. U3 Advisors mapped 4,000+ public, not-for-profit and community colleges across the United States and compared them with an estimated cost of housing and food, using data from the Census, Zillow, and Consumer Expenditures Survey. We translated our findings into an interactive dashboard that is available for public use.

• As many as 49% of schools underestimate costs of living.
• Almost 20% of all schools underestimate costs of living by over 25%.
• Schools who enroll more low-income students are more likely to underestimate the costs of living.
• Schools in the same geography can widely “disagree” on what it costs to live there. In one example, two schools that were practically on the same street in Massachusetts varied their estimates by almost $10,000.