Up to 14% of community college students are homeless, new study says
college.usatoday.com
college.usatoday.com
The answer traditionally has been "take out $40-200k in student loans," but does anyone realize how terrifying that can be for someone making minimum wage? Imagine having to risk 4x your current salary based on the promise you'll get a job, except you're learning that for a lot of people it isn't working as advertised. It's an insane risk and/or sacrifice we require to just survive.
I run a computer science academy that's free until you get a job (https://lambdaschool.com), and I can't believe how many people we talk to that just $1,000 of tuition would be a deal-breaker for. I was talking to one of our best students last week and learned that she was living on the floor of a relative and trying to use a touchscreen and some half-working cloud editor to code because she couldn't afford any type of computer, even the cheapest $50 version. It was really slowing her down, but she had no other option, and didn't know what to do. (Don't worry, we shipped her a computer.) I hadn't even thought to ask.
The crazy thing is the value of taking someone from unskilled to skilled is enormous; we see $50,000/yr swings in annual salary all the time, and they get that for the rest of their lives. So say they work for 40 years, that's a $2m increase in lifetime salary pre-tax. The cost of us training them to get there is <$10k. But we frequently ask people to either go into an amount of debt or to try to cashflow on minimum wage. It just doesn't work.
This is so totally and utterly not true. What you need these days is the same as you needed in old days: training. Going to college doesn't guarantee you anything unless your future employer considers it "training" -- which is not many fields.
There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training. Even right now there's an enormous demand for experienced electricians in the bay area, and their salaries are starting to rival average tech workers -- especially if they decide to work overtime (which many of them are because the demand is so high).
I highly support and recommend Mike Rowe's organization which is doing a lot to actually help normal people find good paying jobs, and not selling them some absurd dream about education[0].
> There are plenty of blue-collar jobs out there that pay livable wages. They all require some degree of training.
We don't disagree
The consistent trait among all of these guys is that they did good work at a fair price, were pleasant and reliable to work with, consistently communicate and were honest. This results in these guys getting lots and lots and lots of word of mouth referrals, not to mention call backs for future work.
When people are putting up a reasonable chunk of their own after tax money for work like that, 99% of the time it's enough for them that their biggest concern is trust and word of mouth recommendations is where trusted referrals come from. Integrity goes a long way in the contractor world.
Keywords being experienced and bay area which is super expensive to live in. Non experienced wanna be workers in bay area have hard time to pay rent.
This is an extremely privileged statement. Those homeless community college students would jump at the opportunity to take out $20,000 in student loans to get through their studies. The problem is they have no credit and come from a background where getting someone to cosign for your loans is a nonstarter. That leaves a paltry $5k/yr in Pell grant money for living expenses, and hoping your subsidized Stafford loan (if you're even eligible) covers all of tuition/fees/books.
My dad made just enough money to get us past the point where Pell grants were denied because of my Dad's income. Unfortunately, my family still couldn't afford it and I was exceptionally weary of taking out 150k in student loans. The most they could afford to offer me was $200/month in rent. After a semester, I just dropped out and got a job at a local ISP as a software engineer.
Would I have went to school? Absolutely, but I couldn't afford it. As a person with Aspergers, it would have also been exceptionally hard for me to work /and/ attend school full-time. I tried that and it didn't work out.
I still have dreams of getting a doctorate. I love school and I love learning. I love being in class and attending lectures. Maybe when I can afford it and do just that, I'll do it.
As a person who graduated three years ago, the education system (even to an upper-lower/lower-middle class kid) is absolutely disheartening and dream crushing. Intellectuals don't speak of social darwinism, but their organizations, fiscally and structurally, still do. I will always feel inadequate for never having achieved a degree that all my friends will soon or now have.
I learned to only rely on myself, though. It's turned me into a very mature and responsible 21 year old. It still feels like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm working on it.
Agreed. It was an emotional response to a subject of personal issue.
But why didn't she just go to the public library? An internet cafe? How many hours and how much frustration was endured trying to code on a touchscreen device?
She isn't close to one. And I don't know of many libraries that are cool with you videoconferencing with instructors and pair programming 8 hrs/day.
Ultimately, there really isn't anything that can be done - you can't kick someone out because they look or smell a certain way if they're using a public utility the way it was meant to be used.
That "you smell" thing is basically code for "no homeless people." There is no objective smell-o-meter that indicates when someone is actually a threat to public welfare or something. And in settings where people did not know I was homeless, I did not see evidence that I actually smelled bad. They would ask me about my vacation plans while cutting my hair.
There's lots that can be done. How about more computers, for a start? If they're monopolizing 100 computers then how about 1000? Install public showers and laundry facilities, too. Add in a volunteer job training center. Run free programming classes and job interview tutorials. Resumé review classes would be great, too.
Don't do it. Life is all about priorities and keeping your focus. Once you start mixing work and studies, both will suffer.
Go hungry, sell plasma, visit a food bank, do what you have to do. But keep your eye on the prize.
There were certainly periods of time where I didn't see friends much, and my husband had to (gasp) cook dinner once in a while, but it was doable, and I graduated with a 3.7 GPA. I'm not a genius, I certainly did my fair share of procrastination, it was mostly just about making almost every day a "work day" (at least for a few hours), keeping things interesting by alternating between different types of work, and finding creative times/ways to study (commuting, lunch break, doing class busywork watching TV in the evening, etc)
I don't think I would have gotten "more" out of the program by quitting my job and just doing that full time. If anything, the financial stress would have made things more difficult.
How far in the black will a minimum wage job put you month/month? How long will it take to put yourself up on your feet with it?
You pay a fixed percentage of salary if you're above a certain threshold (currently $50,000/yr). If you don't get a job in your field above that threshold you never pay us anything.
Fixed percentage forever? Fixed percentage of only the first job? Fixed percentage until a certain amount has been paid?
I heard a coworker basically boast about making $300,000 a year coding in python. Thing is afaik, he didn't have a college degree. He knows how to code in python and was able to put in extra hours for a client who was in a hurry to get something done while working as a contractor.
This IT career track is pretty amazing to me.
You can get on a fast track to make a lot of money, with no college degree or having to go through an expensive (in time/money) training program. But if you didn't put in enough hours (much like having a second part or full time job) to learn new skills, you will be knocked off the fast track before you know it.
(Yes, there are badly run publically owned railways. What I'm saying is that it seems to be impossible to successfully run a railway privately.)
How expensive is community in Cali?
It does seem the system isn't made to inform people of their options.
While I'll gladly take the cheaper degree compared to those offered in universities, it isn't as cheap as most people anticipate. Many of my co-workers talk about it in a similar fashion and are quite surprised when I show them what I'm being charged.
Why can't this model be extended into a 4 year school for twice the price?
I had friends who were working class but not poor and they got that for school.
Let's be real... outside of trade professions like programming/carpentry/plumbing/etc. an associates degree is barely a step up from a GED (and sometimes worse: "Why didn't you just take the extra two years and get your bachelors???"). It also doesn't really matter how cheap it is, the main cost for the community college demographic is the opportunity cost. Most don't have support structures to give them the basics while they are at school, so they have to support themselves PLUS earn an extra 2.5k in disposable income, and then keep up with their studies on top of all of that. And since an associates gives you extremely limited social mobility in comparison to a bachelors most just forgo it, often replacing school with an extra job.
In terms of social mobility a college degree is the new high school degree, anything less is exactly that and will not give you sufficient social mobility especially when you're on the lower end of the spectrum to begin with. We need to accept this and begin treating college like we did high school, making it free and standardized for everyone. The only other option I can see is trying to radically change social norms that have developed over the past 30-40 years and I just don't think that's feasible outside of select industries like ours.
The real problem is a huge swath of the US economy is based on reputation not ability. Exclusivity is the goal, so the more people reach benchmark X, the further companies will move the benchmark.
Of course, you really don't have this problem in economies where middle class jobs aren't scarce...
A factory cares about it's absolute production vs cost. However, a lawsuit is based in part on relative skill.
High school already doesn't mean anything, making college free and standardized means that college becomes not just a defacto expectation but something everyone has to do and there's really no point in that when we have the level below that underperforming.
Both are monumental tasks, though.
I think the real genius of making college free is not making it mandatory (of course, easier said than done). It's there if you need it and want to take the next step in your education, but for those who would rather not be there or would do something else that should be a viable option as well, and then you don't have to marginalize the education across the board.
If you look at NYC, they have a model of neighborhood elementary schools and location based high schools, but also a network of merit based advanced and magnet schools.
When I was in high school in a rural upstate NY town, we had tracked programs with "smart" and "not so much" kids and rarely interacted directly with kids more than one track up or down in school. (There was only 90 kids in the graduating class)
It was a real eye opener when taking some mandatory class as a senior (something like civics) when I discovered that my writing partner didn't really know how to read or write. To me that's the tragedy of schools -- that should not happen.
There need to be other changes to go with that, but the people electing to stop school would be happier and I think wouldn't miss out on much learning.
Worked a part-time (20-30 hours) job, had an apt, but was evicted because people I lived with partied all the time and didn't obey the rules. I didn't have enough to get a place on my own, so I slept in my car or at the homes of friends for almost a year, keeping the tech support call center job and going to school.
Though I didn't get a degree, it was a good lesson of personal responsibility, lifelong learning, and not relying on others. Ended up in software development by starting at the bottom at a tech company (customer service) and learning on my own time at night, clawing my way up. If my parents would have taken me back in (if they even would have), I'm not sure I'd be where I'm at today. I do wish I would have been able to graduate though.
This experience is sort of what leads me to view with derision tech interviews that only focus on CS/algorithms, and ignore the more common day-to-day challenges of software engineering, most of which I learned on the job.
Being young, single, and broke sucks, but the situation isn't nearly as hopeless.
I agree that making sure that person, and people like them, should have the support needed to make sure that both them and their child are fed and housed and generally taken care of. Why that means I should be implicitly subsidizing the business, instead of them being obligated to pay a living wage, is beyond me.
You're not subsidizing that company. The company is subsidizing welfare. A person making at least some money requires less money in form of social transfers.
In the end, is it better to subsidize that person's wages or have them become completely unemployable? This is not a leading question. Perhaps it would be better to just pay them to be a parent but it's not obvious to me.
I'm sorry, but I will not accept the argument that it is ok for a company to have their employees on welfare. They are a for-profit entity. I should not be subsidizing them because they choose not to pay their employees enough.
The whole minimum wage debate in the US is a shitshow. Both sides of the debate are equally idiotic. What matters is minimising the amount of welfare the government has to pay to keep people out of poverty. If the minimum wage is too low, then like you say, the government has to subsidise some companies that can afford to pay more but aren't, because there's a surplus of labor. If the minimum wage is too high, then people that would otherwise be employed become unemployed, and stop generating any wealth, which results in the government having to pay more welfare overall.
This is a complex problem that needs to be solved using large amounts of data. Arguments like yours barely scratch the surface.
And I disagree. I believe there is. At the very least, I believe that a company should not be relying on labor subsidized by welfare.
So you are saying that an external force should make companies pay different wages to different employees depending on what a particular person needs for their standard of living?
Also it is possible to live without welfare (even if you qualify) if your expenses are low, but require welfare if your expenses are high. So it would also follow that two employees of equal value to a company would be paid differently with the larger amount going to the one who is living in more expensive housing.
You can't have children, a home, a vehicle, access to education, health care, recreation, and artistic pursuits. Pick two or three, and maybe in the future you might be able to acquire others.
Oh and don't pick children, since you'll have to provide those to your child as well, some of them immediately.
Officially, inflation is only 2% a year
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0L1E?output_view=p...
I find CPI to be genuinely curious basket. Where are they finding housing, college, and health care that's only going up 2% a year? Certainly not the west coast where 10-20% annual increases are routine.
http://www.georgistjournal.org/2012/09/21/denying-inflation-...
However, there are a lot more people living in Nowhereville, Middle America, where rents are not going through the roof. There aren't any jobs there, but that's not reflected in the CoL index.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
CPI is funny about certain things... it weighs rents highly which skews things as there's an effective price floor through the "prevailing rents" that drive housing subsidy.
Measuring inflation is apparently quite hard and there are always some conspiracy theories. I think the intention is to try and somewhat filter out real estate bubbles from CPI which does make some sense if you assume a certain mix of home owners, long time renters, new renters. New renters may see a large % gain but they are only a small portion of a normal market.
The problem is not really how we measure CPI. The problem is ZIRP that is skewing everything. Hopefully we can start moving away from that.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...
This may slow the adoption of self-driving trucking for smaller companies (many larger companies do own the truck), but it will hurt the drivers that much more when it happens.
And while those are technically possible on public transportation (bus) . I don't want to sleep on a bus. Especially if I am by myself with a laptop bag. And the times it takes to wait for bus and walk to/from makes it unappealing. But a private pod is completely different for my scenario
Depending on where you are, this is likely with a really long commute. I think there's some study somewhere that found long commutes to be one of the biggest sources of stress in the US.
Delaying kids is wise for pretty much everyone, though.
Delaying childbirth increases the incidence of birth defects. Also, it may be that sleep deprivation later in life is worse for the parents, with regards to dementia. People in their 20's have much better physical and energy resources for dealing with children. In the old days, younger people lived in closer proximity to older people who could relay their experience, so we had the best of both worlds for child-rearing.
I suspect that much of the malaise of modern life is actually based on isolation and the breakdown of community interrupting the transmission of incidental knowledge. Now we have developed an online substitute which has some dramatic disadvantages. Our culture is becoming coarser and bereft of its finer points and subtler knowledge. Much of the population of this website will knee-jerk against this observation, even while extolling the power and value of such knowledge giving certain companies like Apple and various startups their special competitive advantage.
In any case, a society which artificially forces the delay of childbirth for its poorer citizens might seem dystopian to many. Some would argue that letting market forces determine this is far better than government edicts. What we have now is a society that subjects most everyone to market forces with regards to reproductive decisions, except for the very poorest and most disconnected with cultures of productivity. Weird when you think about it that way.
You've got a good point about childbirth. I was thinking a bit too much of people who have 3 kids by 25, which seems to put lots of stress on them and their kids.
The number does not surprise me, considering there is a 1 in 7 chance a community college student will finish [1]. This stat was one of the reasons I altered my class to allow 3 hours of open lab time to work on homework with me available. I had a number of non-traditional students (former military, GEDs, single mothers). When they were not in school, they were working (or dealing with kids). We can joke about how computer science students are night owls working on their assignments for long hours, but that seems like an arbitrary ceiling when you have someone that doesn't fit the "young adult that has free time" mold. Hell, its the motivator for my PhD research, making CS work easier to understand/complete.
Now, I will also say, this study is glossing over "Pell chasers", who only sign up for community college to get the Pell grant and then never show up again. My initial thick skin came from building a rapport with students only to see them vanish as soon as that check came. It doesn't help they can do this for 9 semesters before getting in "trouble" (no legal trouble, just no more free money). At my school, you had to show up to class once (first day when no one lectures) to get your money.
I will say that teaching CC was very interesting and rewarding. I've met deadbeats, Pell chasers, former prisoners, former crack heads, and geniuses that dropped out of HS. Just showing them you actually cared about their learning could be the world to them - some are scamming the system, but some truly don't want to drive a forklift for the rest of their lives.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2010/02/02/most-community-colle...
Edit - Fixed some numbers I had wrong.
Incorrect.
The study actually found that, "63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and almost 14 percent were homeless..."
That 14% is therefore a percentage of a percentage of a subset of those surveyed.
Meaning it only makes up 8.82% of "parenting" students, alone, and we are never given what percentage that the "parenting" subset comprises of the whole.
So the headline should really read, "Less than 8% of community college students surveyed are homeless."
Where homeless can mean thrown out or evicted from a previous residence, stayed in a shelter or abandon building, car, etc., or actually had no home or idea where to stay.
While the study is worthwhile, the USA TODAY article is worthless.
For your interpretation to be right the wording would have to be, "63% of students are food-insecure and, of those students, 14% are homeless". As written, there is no indication that those two percentages are related.
Actually, no. For my interpretation to be absolutely correct it would need to be:
"63 percent of parenting community college students surveyed were food insecure and of those students almost 14 percent were homeless..."
So I see your point and I stand corrected, but I contest that the sentence in question was written very poorly--easily leading to this misinterpretation.
The subject of it is "parenting community college students", yet the context shifts regarding the 14% according to the table you mentioned.
There the 14% is representative of "Prevalence of Housing Insecurity, Homelessness, and Food Security Among Survey Respondents."
Therefore, the 14% is of the whole but that sentence alludes, incorrectly, to only the "parenting" subset.
> Of children who have parents that are in community college, 14% are homeless?
There is no breakdown of such characters on a parenting vs. non-parenting basis.
So it could be 13% of "homeless" students are parenting vs. 1% who are non-parenting, the complete reversal, or anything in between.
As in_cahoots noted above, check out Table 3 of the data. It alone is much more clear on what's what.
What is surprising to me is that I'm expected to teach a homeless person in such a way that they pass the class and know the material. When a homeless person fails my stats suffer. It is not reasonable that a person whose life is in chaos be able to pass their classes and understand what has been taught.
I recently left teaching CC to pursue a PhD, one thing I will say is don't let CC become "No Child Left Behind". Let your stats suffer and fight administration when they ask why. I've had co-workers that just handed students a Cengage textbook and surfed the internet all day, and these were SENIOR MEMBERS of the department. As much as I hate the stereotype, this is government work - you need to do A LOT to get fired. Hell, actually trying to teach might label you a "hard worker".
As I mentioned in another comment, my solution was to rethink how I taught. I had a 2 hour lecture and a 3 hour lab each week. So, class 1 was pure lecture and class 2 was just giving them time to work on homework (I wouldn't classify what I did as flipped, but sort of). Assume outside class time they CANNOT (no will not) do the work. In that mindset, how do you provide them time to learn? Just like in a martial art, the sensei doesn't lecture the entire time and you are expected to drill at home, there is actual class time devoted to drilling.
If you don't have enough time, fight for more time. If you're the Stat instructor, look for your state's course library [1] (link to NC's). Dig through the courses, find which ones offer more credits. Then go through the 1-2 year legalities to have it pass. This was how I ensured my Java students had passed at the very least algebra before taking my class.
Other tricks of the trade are recording lectures and posting them online. Give them every opportunity to succeed. Then, its their own inabilities that cause them to fail - the blame can't be on you, you gave them every chance.
But when you stray into multiple residency or homelessness, those definitions drift apart. Different definitions of homelessness may focus on different words that are not strictly synonymous, which makes those definitions also drift apart.
In a strict technical sense, you can't be without a domicile, but it may be difficult to do things like vote or pay taxes or get licenses for your domicile when you are outside it and without at least a semi-permanent mailing address.
But you can be without a permanent residence, even if you have been sleeping in the same spot for a while. That occurs whenever you don't have the legal right to be there. If your name (or your custodial parent's name or legal guardian's name) is not on the lease, that address is not your permanent residence, even if it is a long-term roof over your head.
But then some people define homeless as having no literal building in which to shelter. Living in a tent or vehicle on property that you own may meet this definition, yet still qualify as having a residence. Some definitions go so far as to measure one's intent for sleeping that night. If you have no idea whatsoever where you will lay your weary head tonight when exhaustion takes you, you are so thoroughly homeless that you might as well be referred to as "homeleast". That's why these surveys have to ask so many questions--to identify those with shelter situations of most and least concern.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about employer cutbacks to employee training programs? It seems to me they're shifting those costs to tax payers...
So there are 1.4 million homeless students?
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says 564,708 people in the U.S. are homeless (2015)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-idUSKCN0...
Most homeless people don't end up on the streets, and don't stay homeless for very long. It's still an incredibly wretched experience, and not a sustainable one. Once you've burnt through all your friends that will lend you their couch, you will be sleeping on the street.
That bum asking you for change in SoMo? They too were sleeping on a friends' couch, before they ended up panhandling.
I doubt it's mostly people actually roughing it on the streets, the colloquially understood definition of "homeless". If it's not, it's mighty dishonest of them to use a picture of tents for the article (fake news?).
Any of the below items:
– Thrown out of home: 6%
– Evicted from home: 3%
– Stayed in a shelter: 2%
– Stayed in an abandoned building, auto, or other place not meant as housing: 4%
– Did not know where you were going to sleep, even for one night: 8%
– Didn’t have a home: 2%
But the real problem here is that a significant number of CC students don't have a stable home life and this WILL cause serious obstacles for the completion of any academic program.
Very few people are actually "live-on-the-street" homeless, but housing insecurity starts having negative impact long before they're literally on the street.
The actual report is this.. .http://wihopelab.com/publications/Hungry-and-Homeless-in-Col...
Its a pretty bad handicap for students when things like that happen during their studies.
Rather than students attending community college and becoming homeless either from those costs, or from having gone to a "four year" university that forced them into debt.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h...
People who tell others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps should try to make sure these people at least have boots.
If your GPA drops below a certain point, they withdraw aid and you become homeless. Simple as that.
(P.S. i then got a Bachelor of Engineering from a 4 year college, interned at Stanford University, was a GSoC fellow, got a lead iOS developer job at a startup in NYC making ALMOST 6 figures, got kicked out of the country for not getting selected at the H1B, worked at a startup in Paris, quit the startup in Paris because it was boring, and spent the last 6 months burning through my saving while living in Paris to build a startup without business model. I am now nearly homeless, but working freelance while nearly ready to launch my startup. Almost homeless, though!)
Did you know lipstick causes breast cancer, given that nearly 80% of people who get breast cancer wear lipstick?
I might be crazy, my mum didn't get me tested.