Ryan Sturley wasn’t surprised to hear that housing insecurity among students on Portland State University’s campus stood at 45% last year. The statistic, which came from a survey conducted by the school’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative, aligned with what Sturley has seen as the development manager at local nonprofit College Housing Northwest.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: PSU students struggle with housing, food insecurity
“The reality facing students now is that even if they’re working a part-time or full-time job, they’re barely able to pay to meet their basic needs and still do well in school,” he told Street Roots. “Especially housing combined with meeting other basic needs, (it’s) often much more expensive than tuition.”
Sturley’s not wrong. During the 2018-19 school year in Oregon, room and board accounted for an average of 48% of college costs for students at two- and four-year public colleges. Fewer than half of the community college students in the state managed to gain their associate degrees or transfer to a four-year institution within four years of starting school.
Sturley and his colleagues at College Housing Northwest, which manages below-market rate properties for students in Portland and Corvallis, are attempting to quell those numbers through the new Affordable Rent for College Students (ARCS) pilot program, hopefully boosting graduation rates in the process.
The pilot is subsidizing 50% of rent for 15 students facing housing insecurity or homelessness who attend either PSU or Portland Community College through March 2021, although it may expand to students at Mount Hood Community College and Oregon State University.
With an initial $75,000 investment, the organization is also footing the bill for application fees, security deposits and most utilities aside from electricity.
“The hope would be (to reach) as many students as need housing,” he said. “Obviously, that would probably entail creating new housing or buying additional buildings to be able to serve both the students that are in greater need as well as existing students.”
PCC student Memory Condren, 20, is able to live in a Goose Hollow studio apartment with her partner through the ARCS program. They split the rent, at $550, and it allows them to live comfortably.
Condren’s decision to move out on her own this year meant taking responsibility for her living and schooling expenses, something made trickier by the fact that her expected family contribution — the amount her parents should be able to pay toward her education according to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — is too high for her to receive much federal aid.
“I’m having to go through the nooks and crannies to find all the scholarships that I can because, you know, they’re expecting my family to pay a lot,” she said. “Right now, I’m really lucky. I’m not in any kind of debt.”
On Nov. 19, College Housing Northwest, PSU and MHCC were scheduled to convene the Student Housing Insecurity Virtual Summit to gather stakeholders around a predicament many students in the Portland metro area are facing.
The summit is aimed at bringing developers, politicians and nonprofits together. The goal is to get them energized and motivated to change policies, find resources to build housing and ultimately develop new housing programs, said Bhaktirose Dawdy, the Student Success Program coordinator at MHCC. One in three students at her college were found to be either homeless or facing housing insecurity earlier this pandemic.
The inability of Oregon college students to afford rent and sustenance is a statewide problem, and it’s worsened since the coronavirus pandemic took hold.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Community colleges, students grapple with housing insecurity during the pandemic
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The Hope Center, which studies food and housing insecurity among college students nationwide, reported that 3 in 5 students faced some type of insecurity this spring.
Higher levels of educational attainment correlate with lower rates of unemployment, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A bachelor’s degree can yield more than double the weekly earnings of a high school diploma. But to make it across the graduation stage, be it virtual or in person, many students are turning to loans to cover the costs of school and their basic needs along the way.
Inflation-adjusted state data is clear: Oregon spent roughly $1,300 less per full-time equivalent four-year university student during the last biennium as compared to the early 1990s, before the 2008 recession. Federally, the Pell Grant — which maxes out at $6,345 this school year — fails to keep pace with tuition costs that rose more than 160% from 1988 to 2017, according to CNBC.
Now, national student loan debt has reached an unprecedented $1.7 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. President-elect Joe Biden has proposed cutting $10,000 in federal student loans for all borrowers, making public university tuition free and increasing the maximum amount for the Pell Grant.
Students like Dray Aguirre at Central Oregon Community College, who grew up during the 2008 recession and uses loans to pay for necessities, are hesitant to take on more debt even if it means skipping meals or being cold. He’s studying to become a nurse.
“I really want to do this, and I will succeed,” Aguirre, 31, told Street Roots.
The travel trailer in rural Tumalo where he lives doesn’t have a fridge, a shower or wireless internet. Heat and electricity are fleeting, making for difficult winters in the high desert of Central Oregon, where temperatures can dip into the low 20s.
Aguirre identifies as homeless. In his time on campus at COCC, he’s also become a prominent advocate for students like himself who battle food and housing insecurity.
Students who are military veterans, parents, LGBTQ+ or who grew up in foster care experience food and housing insecurity at higher rates, according to recent national Hope Center data. Rates of homelessness were highest among students identifying as American Indian, Alaskan Native, Indigenous, Pacific Islander or Native Hawaiian, and food and housing insecurity were highest among Indigenous, Alaskan Native, American Indian and Black students.
These disparities are not lost on Aguirre, who identifies as Native American and Latino and has spent much of his adult life working physical labor jobs and couch surfing. He told Street Roots that it sometimes felt like he was paying to work rather than the other way around.
“I decided to go to school to break that and stop the stigma that a Native American, Latino man can’t move forward,” he said.
Aguirre doesn’t want to leave COCC without first helping establish better infrastructure for students working to move away from what he describes as the “survival mentality,” which he notes has increased since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“That’s the best way I can put it,” Aguirre said. “We’re living off bare minimum and that alone is a struggle, and it’s hard to get out of that mentality after a long period of time.”
Aguirre’s interest in seeing better resources for students aligns with a national movement in higher eduction as conversations around basic needs insecurity move to the forefront. Jennifer Fountain, dean of student retention and success at Tacoma Community College in Washington, calls it a paradigm shift.
“I think colleges, and universities as well, do have a responsibility to meet students where they are,” she said. “And that includes a student who is homeless, a student who is fleeing domestic violence, a student who is starting all over.”
Fountain oversees the College Housing Assistance Program, which provides more than 170 eligible Tacoma students with vouchers for rent and options for subsidized housing in collaboration with the local housing authority and partner properties. It served as a model for the Portland ARCS pilot.
She told Street Roots that demand for the program is outstripping available resources. Right now, nearly 160 students are on the wait list to participate.
And, the program has flaws, she said. The application is long and complicated, especially for students who lack computer access. The “income-first” approach is limiting. There aren’t enough two- or three-bedroom units to meet the demand of student parents with young kids. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of “homelessness,” which CHAP uses to prioritize students for the program, excludes students who might be couch-surfing or “doubled-up” in other homes.
In its pilot year, the participation in the program showed higher GPAs and completion rates among participants. Recently, however, a preliminary study showed that fewer CHAP participants are enrolled in classes this fall than there were in 2018.
“All kinds of things come up that interfere with their ability to stay enrolled. The responsibility really is on us to identify what a carrot is, instead of what a punishment is. The last thing we would ever want to do is return a student to homelessness,” she said. “That’s not in line with the values of the program.”
Dawdy, who pioneered the MHCC Student Success Program, which supports underserved students who are often low-income or first-generation, said solutions to issues like basic needs insecurities on campus have the potential to be supported on both sides of the political aisle.
If colleges partner with governmental, nonprofit or private resources to support students now, the students are less likely to rely on government assistance later, Dawdy said.
“It’s not about creating systems that are creating dependency,” she said. “We’re becoming more and more of an integrated community to help students.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of Central Oregon Community College student, Dray Aguirre. We regret the error.