A shocking new study concludes that one in 10 students at Cal State University is homeless, and one in 5 lacks steady access to food.
About one in 10 of California State University’s 460,000 students is homeless, and one in five doesn’t have steady access to enough food, according to the initial findings of a study launched to better understand and address an issue that remains largely undocumented at the nation’s public universities.
“This is a gasp, when you think about it,” Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White said Monday at a conference in Long Beach, where more than 150 administrators, researchers, students and advocacy groups gathered to exchange ideas, case studies and their personal experiences with the issue.
White, who commissioned the study, emphasized the need for Cal State, the largest public university system in the nation, to tackle the issue systematically across its 23 campuses.
“We’re going to find solutions that we can take to scale,” he said. “Getting this right is something that we just simply have to do.”
David Berliner, the esteemed researcher, sent this story to me, and commented:
I am a proud graduate of CAL State LA, and Gene Glass and I happily teach a summer school course at Cal State San Jose.
These are great “people’s colleges,” not elite, but with quite good staffing, often U of California and Stanford grads, and with some very good students, as well.
Last year they graduated their 3 millionth undergraduate, most of whom in previous decades went there almost free. This why, I think, California is such an economic dynamo, even with its high poverty rates and high ELL rates.
But how can quality education AMONG OBVIOUSLY MOTIVATED STUDENTS take place with 1 in 10 homeless and 1 in 5 with food insecurity?
Shame on us.
What is happening in this country? The best way to make America great again is to address the poverty that is eating away at our people, destroying lives, homes, and families.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Even when one “knows” all the facts, certain details still have the power to amaze, and to disturb.
I sure hope they have “grit.”
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Grit……. these students are homeless. Shame on our country.
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Evidence of distribution of wealth in the U.S., and a harsh reality of the winner take all mentality.
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Whenever I run into former students of mine, they all state that they are currently enrolled at a Cal State, or will after transferring to one of them from community college. One works part time as a cashier at a grocery story, another at an office supply store, and on and on while attending college or community college… it’s always rewarding to talk to and catch up with them, as in … maybe I played some small part in their (cross your fingers) successful lives as adults.
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How do they pay for tuition???
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In all likelihood, they pay their tuition with student loans, which they’ll be struggling to pay off for years to come (like me). I don’t happen to work at that college, but I am an ed school professor and I can usually tell the students in my courses who are there just for the loan money, because they do just enough work the first week to pass muster and get the disbursement, then little to nothing from the second week on.
Someone ought to look into how many professors are homeless as well, because 70% of US professors today are contingent faculty who are hired just from one term to the next (terms are 8 weeks long where I teach) and many of us are very low paid, so there are probably more like me.
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Payday Loans will be happily waiting for them…
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We’re going to find solutions that we can take to scale,” — Cal State University Chancellor Timothy White
maybe he should first take a look at his own salary (over 400K) and that of administrators in his office.
Maybe it’s time that people like White stopped making a killing off of public jobs.
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You’re right about that, Poet. Managerial salaries are completely out of control, and a big part of the social inequality problem. At least it’s still a public job, though. Whenever I read something in the LA Times, I wonder if it’s a red herring in the privatization scam. K12 charter schools are ruinous enough. Tuition needs to drop, but watch out if anyone starts using dog whistles like “tuition reform”.
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This is the type of opportunity for students that deserves our support. We don’t need a bunch of parallel schools to drive public education into ruin. We as a culture gain nothing from “choice” which has been shown to cost us more and return us less. The big winners are the hedge funds and billionaires that use taxpayer funds to underwrite the risk, and the “profit” disappears off to the Cayman Islands or some other tax haven. There is no more reward to the taxpayer than public schools, and there is a lot less return when these companies start grabbing real estate. Within a large public system there may actually be more options for students than a one size fits all charter. “Choice” is a marketing ploy.
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The Bill Gates Cabal in partnership with Pearson already has the answer for this — spend millions in a national media propaganda blitz boasting, without any reputable evidence, that you have the solution, a test wrapped in opaqueness and secrecy that is pre-programmed to cause poor results that will then be blamed on the traditional public schools, its teachers and the teachers’ unions. This, of course, will open doors to more public money.
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Yep on Gates. I have spent most of the day looking at multimillion grants from the Gates foundation, so it was easy to check on investments for Cal State
Here are the only two for California State University.
Date: March 2014 Purpose: to advance the planning and implementation work of public state college and university systems seeking to dramatically improve access and success for underserved students Amount: $200,035
Date: February 2014 Purpose: to support commitments from the California State Legislature and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to create the California Open Education Resource Council and the first version of the California Open Source Digital Library to increase adoption of open textbooks Amount: $500,000
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Bottom line – If poverty is that bad at the college level, imagine the poverty in our elementary and secondary schools and our schools cannot turn that poverty around by themselves. This poverty is a cancer that we must deal with in the richest country in the history of humanity and no amount of testing will end that poverty.
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In K-12 public education the childhood poverty rate is almost 1 in 4, More than 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses.
“Most of these children have parents who work, but low wages and unstable employment leave their families struggling to make ends meet. Poverty can impede children’s ability to learn and contribute to social, emotional, and behavioral problems. Poverty also can contribute to poor health and mental health. Risks are greatest for children who experience poverty when they are young and/or experience deep and persistent poverty.
Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children’s well-being.”
http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html
And what do the corporate reformers of public educaiton boast they will do to solve this challenge — test away the problem as long as the autocratic corporations behind the testing can stay opaque as they are paid the public’s money.
If anyone wants to know why Finland’s education system is considered one of the best in the world, the answer is simple, because less than 5 in 100 children live in poverty.
As for China’s students in Shanghai being #1 on the international PISA test, the reason is also simple. By age 15, most of the students in China have left the public education system and only the top students continue on to high school by using a test and rank system that locks the majority of children out of high school and even more out of college. In China compulsory education is only for nine years and ends in middle school. To get into a voluntary academic high school, the children must compete by taking a high stakes, high pressure test that ranks children by test scores. And this is obviously what Bill Gates wants for the U.S.
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Important info! Thanks for sharing it.
Shanghai is a city, so why are they even listed when it’s evident they are an outlier due to sampling bias, while every other place listed is a country, not a city. In the big picture, their rank is meaningless.
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It’s not just that many kids have left school by age 15. In Shanghai, many migrants from rural areas are not allowed in the school systems at all–they are expected to return to their rural locations for school. So even more are locked out of the system.
If we just tested our top 20% or so of American students for the PISA, we would blow every country out of the water.
Not that it matters. Frankly, who CARES where our students score? The U.S. has always tested low in these things, and it hasn’t kept us from becoming an economic powerhouse. Test scores of 15 year olds do NOT predict ANYTHING whatsoever.
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This article does not shock me at all. Honestly, I am surprised the percentage is not higher. The middle class is dying. The middle class is struggling to make a living and get their children through college. The cost of higher education is through the roof, and you will see less young people choose teaching as a profession. They simply cannot afford to take the risk on a profession which devours its young and old alike. Many young people are working full time and taking “gap” years, so they will not be destroyed by debt throughout their 40’s and 50’s. Our United States is in deep trouble, and many people do not see it.
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I think we need to ask where technology is in this phenomenon. When we faced a Great Depression, so many people were put to work on infrastructure projects. When the Great Recession came, a very few people worked on a road project near us. Some drove heavy equipment, others surveyed. The project would have employed hundreds in 1930. In 2008 there might have been 20 working on it at one time.
Malthus suggested that there would always be more workers than needed due to human fertility rates. Now technological innovations are shrinking the number of people needed to do various jobs. What will happen to humanity if humans are no longer needed?
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