Document Author: Kallie Clark

Homelessness and Housing Insecurity Among Community College Students: A Longitudinal Evaluation of a Housing Choice Voucher Program (2024)

Housing insecurity and homelessness among American community college students are widespread
problems that reduce the odds of college attainment and undermine students’ health and well-being.
In 2014 Tacoma Community College and the Tacoma Housing Authority launched the College Housing
Assistance Program (CHAP) to address this challenge by offering housing choice vouchers to local community college students experiencing or at serious risk of experiencing homelessness. If students could
successfully navigate the application process and local housing market, the vouchers offered a short-term
subsidy to reduce their rent and hopefully promote degree completion. Over the next several years, CHAP
received national and regional awards and became a model for affordable college housing programs. This
evaluation examines its effects on students before the housing authority ended the program in 2022.

A First Look at the Impacts of the College Housing Assistance Program at Tacoma Community College (2021)

Affording living expenses presents a major barrier to degree completion for many community college students. Food, affordable housing, transportation, and childcare are central conditions for learning. Yet with stagnant incomes, rising tuition and living costs, and insufficient support from financial aid and the social safety net, approximately one in two community college students struggle to afford these basic needs.1 Additionally, as many as one in five experience homelessness.2 The College Housing Assistance Program (CHAP), operated by the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) and Tacoma Community College (TCC), is at the forefront of the nationwide fight to ameliorate homelessness among college students.3 CHAP is one of the country’s first partnerships between a housing authority and a community college and offers a unique model. In contrast to other programs such as student-run shelters, rapid-rehousing, and college-owned affordable apartments, CHAP utilizes government-subsidized housing assistance to provide housing to homeless and near-homeless community college students. This report offers the initial lessons learned from the first external evaluation of CHAP. Successful program implementation is crucial to providing benefits for students, and can be especially challenging in housing programs. We therefore focus on how students experienced the program, where they faced barriers, and where they found support. It is too early in the evaluation process to draw conclusions about the program’s efficacy; these are short-term insights.

Self-reported COVID-19 infection and implications for mental health and food insecurity among American college students (2022)

While the COVID-19 pandemic affected mental health and increased food insecurity across the general population, less is known about the virus’s impact on college students. A fall 2020 survey of more than 100,000 students at 202 colleges and universities in 42 states reveals sociodemographic variation in self-reported infections, as well as associations between self-reported infection and food insecurity and mental health. We find that 7% of students self-reported a COVID-19 infection, with sizable differences by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, parenting status, and student athlete status. Students who self-reported COVID-19 infections were more likely to experience food insecurity, anxiety, and depression. Implications for higher education institutions, policy makers, and students are discussed.

Supporting the Whole Community College Student: The Impact of Nudging for Basic Needs Security (2021)

Even after decades of improvement efforts, completion rates at community colleges remain low, particularly among students who need developmental education. Basic needs insecurity contributes to these low completion rates. As a result, community colleges throughout the country have launched benefits “hubs” to help students secure their basic needs. However, there is limited evidence on whether connecting students with these hubs improves academic success.

This report details an evaluation of the Advocacy and Resource Center (ARC), a benefits hub at Amarillo College (AC) in Texas. In partnership with AC, we conducted an evaluation to advance two institutional goals:

Increase utilization of the ARC, particularly among students most at risk of leaving college, with a low-cost technology-enabled approach.
Estimate the academic impacts of connecting students to the ARC.
Over the course of a year, we emailed randomly selected students from low-income households and those enrolled in developmental education coursework, informing them about and inviting them to the ARC. We found that the emails (or “nudges”) paid off for students who received them:

Rates of visiting the ARC more than doubled from 22% to 56%.
Developmental education students nudged to visit the ARC were 20% more likely to pass developmental education courses, a crucial milestone.
However, we did not find clear evidence that nudged students completed more credits, received higher grades, or passed other courses at higher rates.

As community colleges across the nation work to improve student success and help students recover from the pandemic, this evaluation offers two lessons:

Insufficient information about existing basic needs supports keeps students from getting the help they need. The information barrier may be effectively overcome with personalized nudging, a low-cost solution.
Connecting students to basic needs supports helps students make academic progress, particularly those in need of developmental education.