Student parents face severe housing and food insecurity, according to a new report from the Hope Center For College, Community, and Justice, a research center focused on college completion.
Of a pool of 23,000 parenting students, over 53% were food insecure in the last month, 68% were housing insecure and 17% were homeless in the previous year. The results were based on student parent respondents in the center’s #RealCollege survey, which included 330,000 students from 411 schools.
These are “really high rates of basic needs insecurity,” said the center’s founding director, Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, one of the authors of the report and a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University. “It’s a whole other thing to face food insecurity yourself while you have a child in your house you also need to feed.”