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Safety, Security, and College Attainment: An Investigation of Institutional Responses to Material Hardship Among Undergraduates

Tue, April 12, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Convention Center, Floor: Level Two, Room 209 C

Abstract

This paper examines how college and university leaders are responding to evidence of material hardship—particularly housing and food insecurity—among undergraduates. The recognition of and response to people in need often hinges on how they are viewed by society. Policymakers, academics, and others categorize people facing economic insecurity based on their level of “deservingness.” While often done under the guise of merit and limited resources, characteristics such as nation of origin, home language, and mental health status often influence these typologies. The deserving poor are viewed as those whose financial plight was perceived as due to situations outside of their control; the undeserving are often characterized as indolent or morally deficient. College students straddle the boundary of deservingness: not entirely treated as fully independent adults, and yet are also not blameless youth.

College administrators are under intensive accountability pressures to increase graduation rates and learning outcomes as well as reduce graduation gaps by race and family background, time-to-degree, and loan default rates. Furthermore, these pressures are not accompanied with an increase in resources and supports. At America’s broad access institutions, these are formidable goals and this context must be considered when considering how schools respond to students struggling to make ends meet.
We conducted 59 interviews including 30 with college administrators, six college professors, and 23 campus service providers (i.e., they work for programs and initiatives that target low-income or at-risk students) at 8 colleges (5 two-year and 3 four-year institutions) across five states: California, Florida, New York, Louisiana, and Wisconsin. We then coded and analyzed the resulting data to identify themes relating to institutional responses to students’ material hardships.

We find that one group of leaders embraces the work of meeting students’ basic needs as part of the college mission and actively seeks strategies and solution. They argue that all students who want to attend college are worthy of investment and drew clear connections between students’ economic struggles and their academic outcomes. We term this group’s response “mission driven.” Another group questions the wisdom of enrolling students who faced financial barriers large enough to threaten their access to basic needs. They state that meeting these needs should be a prerequisite for college enrollment, and equate the ability to meet those needs with other types of college preparedness, such that students enrolled without first establishing these basics were automatically deemed unprepared to succeed, and thus did not deserve to be enrolled. This group articulates a response based on notions of the “undeserving undergraduate.” Finally, a third type of response rests on “wishful thinking.” This group is clearly sympathetic to students’ hardships, but at the same time is unclear, unsure, and otherwise not active in identifying clear roles to support them. Some administrators and staff in this group extend help on a case-by-case basis, but they do not extend more systematic interventions. Among this group, a common approach is simply to wish that the problems, rather than the students, would simply disappear or work themselves out.

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