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Comment by msimpson | Hacker News Reader

> It found that 13-14% of students were homeless ...

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.

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The article and headline are correct. You can see for yourself in Table 3 of the linked study.

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.

> 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".

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.

Is this correct or not?

> Of children who have parents that are in community college, 14% are homeless?

The data does not support that conclusion as the 14% represents the whole of those surveyed, which includes both parenting and non-parenting students.

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.

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