A National Research Conference on Food and Housing Insecurity in Higher Education (2017)

The purpose of the AERA research conference award program is to break new ground in substantive areas of inquiry, stimulate new lines of study on issues that have been largely unexplored, or develop innovative research methods or techniques that can contribute more generally to education research. To that end, the program hopes to foster the accumulation of knowledge, enhance dissemination, encourage innovation, and advance studies of the highest quality in education research. In keeping with those goals and desired outcomes, Temple University hosted the “National Research Conference on Food and Housing Insecurity in Higher Education” on October 23 and 24, 2017. The conference brought together researchers from diverse professional levels and fields to advance knowledge in a nascent area of inquiry—college food and housing insecurity. The current state of that field is summarized in a new article in an AERA publication, Educational Researcher, co-authored by Katharine Broton and Sara Goldrick-Rab.1 As that article explains, beyond documenting the numbers of students affected by housing and food insecurity in college, the research field knows little about the dimensions of the challenge, how measurement affects estimates of its scope, the associated impacts on educational attainment, and the most effective strategies to ameliorate those problems. The Research Conference therefore tackled each of those issues, and has already—in just a few months— begun to evidence positive results in terms of cultivating new and innovative research studies in the field. This report describes the Research Conference and its participants, examines the contours of the conversation at the conference, reports on participant feedback, and then describes plans for subsequent research and action.