Document Author: Sara Goldrick-Rab

A Guide for Implementation of the #RealCollege Survey (2024)

Basic needs security includes access to stable housing, healthy food, affordable childcare, reliable transportation, mental and physical health services, technology and internet, and other survival necessities. Meeting college students’ basic needs is essential to their well-being and ability to succeed in college. A key first step is assessing students’ basic needs security. The #RealCollege Survey was the nation’s first multi-institutional assessment of basic needs security among college students. When it was created in 2015, neither the federal government nor any state captured information on the topic. The goal of the survey is to equip colleges with the information needed to support their students holistically. It has been administered at more than 700 colleges and in many cases statewide. Numerous examples of reports using data from the survey are available in the #RealCollege Resource Library. The #RealCollege Survey has inspired the federal government, many states, and countless other researchers to examine and collect data on students’ basic needs. We are now making it freely available for use by postsecondary institutions, their partners, and states to understand students’ needs for support and the challenges they face in accessing help. This guide is intended to support administration, analysis, and dissemination of findings from the #RealCollege Survey. It provides key considerations for fielding the survey, including selecting participants, selecting the questions and modules to use, maximizing participation, minimizing bias, analyzing the data, and disseminating findings. An accompanying appendix lists the survey questions. Please acknowledge any use of this guide and/or questions in your reporting

Staffing Student Basic Needs Centers (2021)

Though social workers are becoming more common on higher education campuses, they often have scarce resources and ballooning caseloads. In addition, they make as much as $65,000 annually. One-stop center concepts, like Amarillo College’s transformation into an Advocacy and Resource Center, are ideal for dealing with student basic needs and include one primary social worker, who supervises Master of Social Work students-in-training. However, not all colleges can make this happen from a budgetary and hiring standpoint. This is where the community healthcare worker could be the answer.

When Care Isn’t Enough: Administrative Burden in Federal Higher Education Pandemic Emergency Aid Implementation (2022)

Departing from traditional financial aid policies, during the pandemic the federal government
introduced emergency aid to higher education for the first time. This study examines the implementation
of that program, including students’ need for and access to the resources and the processes they navigated
to obtain help. We identify multiple forms of administrative burden present, and using both survey data
and focus groups, explain how they affected students and institutions. The psychological costs of
administrative burden were particularly substantial and should be addressed in future programming.

Connecting Students to Basic Needs Hubs During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Evaluation of a Cross-Sectoral Partnership (2023)

Reducing basic needs insecurity among community college students is an equity imperative for improving college attainment, particularly given the challenges the pandemic introduced. One popular approach is co-locating campus support services to help students access support (beyond financial aid), including public benefits and emergency aid. Some institutions operate their own basic needs hubs, while others engage outside providers. This study evaluates a campus-based cross-sectoral approach at two community colleges in King County, Washington. Together, the United Way of King County and area colleges and universities operate “Benefits Hubs” for students, offering support from peer navigators and helping them access financial resources and information. However, many students experiencing basic needs insecurity do not use hubs—a problem shared by many other student support services. Is it possible to increase students’ use of hubs through low-cost outreach? Does that outreach also improve students’ academic outcomes? Evaluators examined these questions during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when students’ needs for support were especially high, and staff were particularly constrained. The colleges collectively identified a group of approximately 3,000 low-income students who might be eligible for public benefits and thus find the Benefits Hubs’ support useful. Those students were divided at random into two groups. Beginning in fall 2020, staff sent the first group emails encouraging them to use hubs. The second group did not receive that outreach but still had access to hubs. A comparison of the two groups following that outreach revealed whether sending those emails—a strategy widely known as “nudging”—those students improved their use of hubs and/or their odds of academic success in terms of grades and retention. The results are mixed and largely inconclusive. On the one hand, outreach modestly increased students’ use of Benefits Hubs. It also reached students in several target demographic groups—older students and those from marginalized communities who are at heightened risk of basic needs insecurity. This suggests that informational barriers contribute to basic needs insecurity and may be partially overcome with inexpensive outreach strategies. However, the benefits of outreach dissipated over time, potentially because the targeted students shared information with their peers who did not receive the emails, and then those students also used hubs. Even with the additional outreach efforts, most targeted students did not use hubs and academic improvements were not evidenced. As community colleges continue to recover from the pandemic and support students to graduation, providing basic needs supports to help students afford college may help. There are several reasons why this evaluation might understate the benefits, including analytic limitations and how the pandemic affected the program. Recent legislation and philanthropy are funding many basic needs hubs, making it especially important to engage in ongoing assessment to develop strategies for strengthening their use and ensuring maximum equitable impact.