Housing and food insecurity among students and staff at Portland State University are widespread, and they’re hitting vulnerable groups on campus hardest, according to a new report by PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative. Researchers fear that job insecurity and disruption sparked by the coronavirus pandemic will only deepen the problem.
“We knew anecdotally that many members of our campus community struggled with stable housing and enough food to eat,” said PSU President Stephen Percy during a Sept. 24 press conference about the report. “But this survey shows that those problems are much more widespread and more challenging than we thought, perhaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The survey was emailed to all students and staff at PSU during the fall term of 2019 and reflects the responses of 15% of the student population and 28.3% of the employee population.
Nearly 45% of student respondents at PSU had experienced housing insecurity within a year of fall term 2019, more than 16% faced homelessness within that year, and 47% experienced food insecurity within the previous 30 days of taking the survey.
Researchers defined homelessness as lacking fixed, adequate nighttime residence, including those who turn to “couchsurfing” with friends or family out of necessity. The survey defined “housing insecurity” as a range of issues that comprise housing livability, including cost, safety, quality and consistency of housing, and “food insecurity” as limited and uncertain access to food due to economic and social conditions.
“Homelessness and housing insecurity can take so many different forms,” said Greg Townley, director of research at HRAC and an associate professor in community psychology at PSU. “We tend to have a stereotype for who experiences homelessness, which doesn’t necessarily fit the typical mold of a college student and certainly not that of a college professor. This makes us overlook warning signs in our students and our colleagues, and they also make them discount their own risk for housing insecurity and homelessness.”
“I had to choose between college and stability, and I chose college.”
One such student, Tara Prevo, a recent graduate of PSU’s mechanical engineering program, said she held straight-A’s and received academic scholarships, was always getting to class early, and even landed an internship with NASA while at PSU.
But during much of that time, she was also living out of her car or in a tent while wondering if she’d make it through college fast enough to provide needed stability to her sick mother.
“I didn’t fit the description. I didn’t fit most descriptions of a homeless student,” she said. “I am your modern-day bootstrapper, and failure in college was not an option. … I had to choose between college and stability, and I chose college.”
Student respondents experiencing basic-needs insecurity were more likely than secure students to rely on jobs while attending college or to take on student loans to cover living and education expenses while at PSU. They also tended to have lower GPAs, higher rates of sleep issues, loneliness and health problems, and more widespread reliance on government assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The federal government does not collect data on homelessness among college students but Portland State’s numbers are at the higher end of the scale when compared to the most prominent national study conducted by the Hope Center out of Temple University.
Homelessness stood between 9% and 16% among students at four-year institutions according to the Hope Center’s 2019 report. But both studies show that basic-needs insecurities were most prevalent among students belonging to groups frequently marginalized in higher education.
Disparities rampant in basic-needs insecurity among students, staff
A breakdown of student responses revealed that Native American students were nearly twice as likely to experience homelessness as white students, and had the highest rates of food insecurity, with 66.4% of respondents having experienced it within 30 days of taking the survey.
More than a fifth of all Black, Middle Eastern or North African, multiracial, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students also experienced homelessness within a year of taking the survey.
More than half of all Black, multiracial, Native American and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander student respondents had faced housing insecurity within the last year as well. Common factors relating to housing insecurity included having to move in with other people or experiencing increases in a rent or mortgage.
Food insecurity also affected students of color at a higher rate compared to white students. Of the students who had experienced food insecurity within the last 30 days of taking the survey, more than half couldn’t afford balanced meals and more than 40% skipped meals at some point.
More than 60% of students who took the survey experienced basic-needs insecurity of some kind, and sometimes experienced multiple forms of insecurity at one time.
The study, in which women made up practically 60% of the respondents, revealed that transgender, non-binary, genderqueer and two-spirit students were more impacted by basic-needs insecurity than their cisgender counterparts. Heterosexual student respondents were far less impacted by basic needs insecurities than students in the LGTBQ community.
Disparities in basic-needs insecurity also existed between disabled students, more than half of whom responded had experienced housing insecurity, who were almost twice as likely to experience homelessness as non-disabled students.
Other groups that tended to experience higher basic-needs insecurity included transfer and first generation students, current and former foster youth, veterans, DACA students and out-of-state students.
The survey was the first in the U.S. to explore basic-needs insecurity among employees. Homelessness impacted more than 5% of employees, food insecurity impacted 16.5% and housing insecurity impacted nearly 23% of the employee respondents.
Notably, Black employees were more than twice as likely to experience basic-needs insecurity as white employees.
Non-tenure-track faculty were also particularly vulnerable to insecurity. Adjunct faculty — who make up 47% of faculty at PSU, according to the PSU Faculty Association — were twice as likely to experience housing insecurity and three times as likely to experience food insecurity as their counterparts.
Townley and Percy both said at the press conference that the results necessitated further exploration into how to provide support for the impacted staff.
The future of basic-needs insecurity on campus
Researchers are urging administrators to work with student and employee groups to reach solutions to basic-needs insecurity, particularly for communities experiencing systemic racism and discrimination. The report emphasized that the coronavirus pandemic was making the work all the more urgent.
“What we really envision is a process where-by campus community groups are engaged in dialogue around what the needs and wishes for types of programs and policies would be,” Townley said during the press conference.
A follow-up survey taken during the pandemic captured the housing status of 166 students who had experienced homelessness or housing security during the first survey. The sample size is significantly smaller, but the results showed an increase in housing insecurity, homelessness and food insecurity.
Students of color were twice as likely as white students to have to leave housing during the pandemic, and about one-third of students were laid off or fired as a result of the global health crisis.
Upwards of 65% of total student respondents in the initial survey reported feeling worried about paying for school.
The release of the full report from the housing collaborative comes on the heels of a nearly 5% tuition increase approved by the PSU Board of Trustees this summer, which boosts annual tuition costs for full-time resident undergraduates to $10,113. Graduate and non-resident tuition will increase by $10 per credit hour for non-resident and graduate students as school begins next week.
Percy, PSU's president, told Street Roots during Thursday’s press conference that they expect a 3% drop in enrollment this coming school year and that rising operation costs were making it difficult to keep tuition down.
Michelle Toppe, vice provost of Student Affairs at Portland State, said that the student food pantry on campus was continuing to serve food and other items to students during the pandemic, through the walk-up window in the Fifth Avenue Cinema Building, and that some forms of transitional and temporary emergency housing were available through the Housing and Residence program on campus.
PSU will co-host a summit on student housing insecurity in November, bringing together students at local community colleges and PSU, as well as with College Housing Northwest, a Portland housing nonprofit that works with the university.
She said PSU and College Housing Northwest were in conversation with Tacoma Community College in Washington, which collaborates with the local housing authority to provide rental assistance to students.
“They’re seeing great results in Tacoma. We hope we could echo some of those in Portland,” she said.
Portland State maintains an online resource hub for students experiencing housing and food insecurity on campus.