This guide describes how to perform two types of studies: • Surveys to assess basic needs security; and • Opportunistic small scale experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of programs meant to address basic needs security.
The Wisconsin HOPE Lab and the American Council on Education Center for Policy Research and Strategy strongly urge the Technical Review Panel of NCES’s NPSAS study to add measurement of food insecurity to the next administration of this key national survey. This will provide policymakers with information required to assess the efficacy of Federal Student Aid in alleviating material hardships and consider the need for new programs to alleviate hunger among undergraduates, assist practitioners in examining how affordable college really is for their students, and enable researchers to produce a more accurate picture of the economic challenges inhibiting college completion.
Below, we describe the rationale for this request and proposed survey questions, drawn from standardized models of assessment that will enable comparisons with national statistics on food insecurity in the broader population.
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.
Fall 2020 Survey
Fall 2020 Survey
Across VCCS’s 23 colleges, the survey was distributed to more than 122,900 students and taken by 10,671 of them, yielding an estimated response rate of 9%. T
In total, nearly 13,000 students from 10 two-year colleges and four four-year colleges and universities in Texas responded to the 2020 #RealCollege Survey, fielded from September to November 2020.
Fall 2018 Survey.
ALMOST 22,000 STUDENTS AT
19 CAMPUSES PARTICIPATED.
THE RESULTS INDICATE:
• 48% of respondents were
food insecure in the prior
30 days,
• 55% of respondents were
housing insecure in the
previous year,
• 14% of respondents were
homeless in the previous
year.