Document Tag: advice for practitioners

Basic Needs for All Students: American Council for Education Webinar (2020)

On June 11, Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, leader of the #RealCollege movement and best known for her innovative research on food and housing insecurity in higher education, will discuss the importance of basic needs and emergency aid for college and university students. Her recent report revealed that 68% of parenting students were housing insecure in the previous year, compared to 42% of students were housing insecure in the previous year. The pandemic has exasperated the crisis around basic needs.

In an unprecedented move, the federal government granted higher ed with nearly $7B through the CARES Act to be used elusively for emergency aid for their students. Learn more about why granting emergency aid has always been important but is most especially critical today, along with strategies for how to assess basic needs and disburse funds. Dr. Goldrick-Rab will share why using an equity lens (to support all students, but especially DACA, students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and student parents) has a clear ROI for higher ed.

The Real Price of College: Estimating and Supporting Students’ Financial Needs (2021)

For decades, complicated financial aid formulas and variable sticker prices have made it difficult for students to understand the real price of college. For colleges, understanding students’ financial need is also challenging; current financial aid formulas cause many students’ actual need to be understated.
This report examines what happens when:
financial aid leaders and staff better understand students’ financial need, as operationalized by negative EFC; and
students better understand college costs and how to advocate for more financial support.
Using data gathered at Temple University and six colleges and universities in Texas, we explore how more nuanced information about college costs and financial need can change beliefs and behavior among financial aid staff, leaders, and students.

College on the Margins: Higher Education Professionals’ Perspectives on Campus Basic Needs Insecurity (2020)

A substantial share of undergraduates are basic needs insecure, meaning they lack consistent access to essential material goods like food and shelter. These material hardships are associated with poorer academic success, but we know very little about higher education professionals’ perspectives on the matter. Purpose: This paper examines how higher education professionals perceive, understand, and support college students who experience basic needs insecurity. Research Design: Using data from interviews with 59 professionals who work at eight broad access public colleges and universities across five states, we employ an institutional logics perspective to understand how they draw on normative scripts, rationales, and schemas to guide their responses to campus basic needs insecurity. Findings: Higher education professionals have considerable discretion when working with students who are basic needs insecure, and they draw on organizational, professional, and broader social spheres to guide their interactions. We identify three distinct logics—systemic, quiescent, and cautious—that are unique from one another on two dimensions: locus of control and individual response based on perceived locus of control. Conclusions: The design and implementation of initiatives designed to support vulnerable students must consider the ways in which on-the-ground professionals understand students, their needs, and the sources of their challenges.