Document Category: Topic Reviews/ Summaries

#RealCollege: The Work and Activism of Sara Goldrick-Rab (2023)

“In the film Hungry to Learn Sara Goldrick-Rab appears wearing a
“#RealCollege” t-shirt. On the back of the shirt is written “it’s not ALL
about Harvard,” referring to the work of the #RealCollege movement in
breaking down stereotypes of the privileged college student in order to reveal
the reality of what college is like for a growing number of students from
poor, working-class, and middle-class backgrounds. Today’s college students
are, increasingly, not the stereotype of a carefree college student but instead
struggling to make it through school while juggling financial and familial
responsibilities. Goldrick-Rab’s work has not only uncovered this important
reality but works to draw attention to it in order to create change.”

Book Chapter from “The Future of American Higher Education: How Today’s Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate”
Edited By Joseph L. DeVitis

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Community College Student Housing Insecurity (2015)

PD&R Expert Convenings: Summary Report.

On September 16, 2015, HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) convened a panel of education and housing experts
to shed light on the topic of housing insecurity among community college students. The convening featured brief presentations by experts
in the field followed by participant discussion. The goals of the convening were to reach a common understanding of the scope and
nature of students’ challenges, identify effective strategies, and discuss the potential role of the federal government in addressing student
housing insecurity.

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.

On Second Chances and Stratification: How Sociologists Think About Community Colleges (2014)

Community colleges increase college access, extending postsecondary educational opportunities to underserved students, yet, these students exhibit low rates of program completion and transfer to 4-year colleges. Sociological research on community colleges focuses on the tension between increasing educational opportunity and failing to improve equity in college completion across key demographics, such as race and socioeconomic status. This article provides an overview of sociology’s approach to understanding community colleges. We describe sociological theories, examine the contributions they make to the field, and discuss the discipline’s recent debates regarding community colleges. We conclude by highlighting research areas for further progress and discussing the role sociology could play in transforming community colleges.