Investing in the future of these students is to invest in the future of the community”: Emergent qualitative findings from the LACCD GI pilot project

• In Event: Guaranteed Income: Understanding Unconditional Cash and Partnerships For Educational Research with Community Colleges

Abstract

The LACCD BOOST GI pilot program was developed to respond to the economic context of LACC students, and to test the potential of unrestricted cash to alleviate barriers to academic progress for students. The LACCD BOOST GI Pilot study is a mixed methods RCT, with two rounds of qualitative interviews–the first round occurred at the mid-point of the pilot, the second round will take place approximately six months after the guaranteed income has ended. This paper discusses the qualitative design of this ongoing research, and addresses emergent qualitative findings from the first round of qualitative interviews.
The increasingly inaccessible costs of post-secondary education in the United States, and strategic shifts towards workforce education programs, makes community college enrollment a strategic choice for many students. In fact, for the 2023-2024 school year, community college enrollment experienced the highest increase across all education sectors (Herget, 2024). Community colleges have traditionally represented a space of possibility for students who are first-generation college attendees, from low-income communities, or from racial, ethnic and gender groups that have suffered exclusion from other avenues of higher education, and are often viewed as a key tool in disrupting generational cycles of poverty (Monaghan & Sommers, 2022; Williams & Nourie-Manuele, 2018). Despite this potential, community college programs experience extremely high rates of student attrition and degree non-completion (Horn & Skomsvold, 2011; Jenkins & Fink, 2016). One of the primary obstacles community college students face is economic, with as many as 50% of students enrolled in 2-year institutions living at or near the poverty line (Fry & Cilluffo, 2019). Economic precarity permeates students’ ability to plan for and successfully complete their degrees both because of its tangible effects—such as food scarcity, limited access to transportation, and housing instability—but also because of the decreased sense of hope and personal confidence that these struggles generate (Wood et al., 2016).
Limited research on unrestricted cash for community college students has demonstrated the ability of cash to improve student financial well-being, as well as fortify their ability to participate in relationships of positive interdependence within their communities (Castro et al., 2024). Drawing on a theoretical framework that connects the impacts of chronic material hardship with one’s capacity to experience hope, set goals, and imagine pathways for achieving those goals (Shah et al., 2015, West et al. 2023), this paper examines the impact of receiving unconditional cash for LACC students, in particular on their sense of self, orientations towards their academic and non-academic goals, and the relationship between their individual futures and that of their communities. As the title of this paper suggests, LACC students repeatedly argued for the value of the GI payments, noting that it was not just an investment in an individual and individual success, but in the success of the broader community. As one student participant Nicole explained, receiving the GI was not just an investment in her, but also in the future of her community which, for Nicole, is “well worth [the money].”

Authors

• Briana Nichols, University of Pennsylvania

• Monique Y. Perry, University of Pennsylvania