Document Tag: basic needs centers

SparkPoint Supports Student Success (2023)

Over the last decade, many Bay Area community colleges asked United Way Bay Area (UWBA) to bring SparkPoint to their campuses because students weren’t getting the holistic support they needed
to stay in school and succeed. SparkPoint offers comprehensive, integrated services that consider students’ strengths, resources, and compounding needs. SparkPoint Centers work with students to meet their basic needs, increase their income, build their credit, increase their savings, and reduce their debt.
  
Previous studies suggest that SparkPoint may contribute to improving student success, including persistence, in community colleges. This evaluation builds on the foundation of those studies and conducts a
more rigorous quantitative analysis that accounts for other factors known to influence persistence and includes comparisons with students who do not participate in SparkPoint. This study includes all San Mateo Community College District (SMCCD) students who were on a degree or certificate track during the 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-2021, and/or 2021-22 school years. Notably, the last two years of this study were during the COVID-19 pandemic which greatly impacted students and disrupted SparkPoint services.

The study reveals substantial evidence that SparkPoint contributes to community college student success (i.e., persist, graduate, or transfer).

The Cumulative Impact of Unmet Essential Needs on Indicators of Attrition: Findings from a Population-Based Sample of Public University Students in the Bronx, NY (2023)

In recent decades, a growing proportion of college students have experienced nancial stress, resulting in unmet essential needs including food insecurity, housing instability, lack of healthcare access, and inadequate mental health treatment. Given that urban-based public universities constitute a substantial proportion of the U.S. college student population, understanding how unmet needs affect academic achievement in this population is crucial for developing strategies that alleviate college failure and dropout. We examined the cumulative impact of unmet essential needs on indicators of college attrition (dropout, leave of absence, risk of academic probation). The sample comprised a population-representative sample of 1,833 students attending one of three urban public colleges in the Bronx, NY. Employing multinomial and binomial logistic regression models, we assessed how total unmet essential needs predicts any indicator of college attrition. Each unit increase in unmet need increased the odds of having any attrition indicator by 32% (p < 0.01). Students with one unmet need had 17% greater odds (p = 0.04), students with two unmet needs had 55% greater odds (p < 0.01), students with three unmet needs had 73% greater odds (p < 0.01), and students with four unmet needs had 82% greater odds (p < 0.01) of having any attrition indicator. Findings revealed a modest dose-response relationship between the number of unmet needs and the likelihood of experiencing indicators of attrition, supporting a potential causal link between unmet needs on the risk of attrition. Designing interventions aimed at college students with multiple unmet essential needs, and addressing these needs holistically, can potentially enhance student retention and graduation rates.

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.

Addressing Food Insecurity on Campus: Connecting Students with Basic Needs Supports to Improve Academic Outcomes (2023)

This report highlights the efforts of four Arkansas community colleges to address students’ basic
needs by transforming their campus food pantries from supplemental food distribution centers to
basic needs hubs connecting students to a broad array of additional, more sustained basic needs
supports.
Drawing on college administrative data, this study assesses the benefits of this basic needs hub
model on students’ academic success. Results from regression analyses point to notable academic
benefits. Specifically:
• Students accessing the basic needs hub are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely
than students not accessing the hub to be enrolled one semester and one year later,
and to earn a credential.
• Low-income students, adult students, and students of color are more likely to access
basic needs hubs, driven by colleges’ targeted outreach efforts to key student
groups.
• The notable academic benefits of the basic needs hub are present for Pell recipients,
for adults, and for students of color – with especially high proportional increases in
credential attainment for students of color who access the hubs.

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.