California Two-Year Colleges Address Student Homelessness

When the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University surveyed students attending two-and-four-year colleges throughout the United States in 2019, the results revealed devastating levels of food and housing insecurity among the more than 38,000 people assessed. At some campuses, as many as 18 percent of students had been homeless—living on the street, in a shelter, or out of their cars—at some point during the last twelve months, while up to 60 percent described their housing situation as precarious, placing them on the brink of losing their homes due to financial difficulties, overcrowding, or other factors. 

The predictable result of housing insecurity: high dropout rates.

These facts aren’t new. Indeed, most public and some private colleges now have food pantries so hungry students can access groceries. Similarly, student services offices routinely distribute gift cards redeemable at local food stores or restaurants to tide students over.

Housing, however, is a different matter. While most four-year colleges and universities have dorms, most two-year institutions do not, largely because community colleges were established to serve commuters. 

But that may be changing on some campuses.

“When housing is not provided to students who have nowhere to live, retention falls into the single digits.”

Dr. Jose Fierro, president of Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, is at the helm of this change, precipitated several years ago when the college’s faculty, staff, and Board of Trustees decided to do something about the poverty that impeded the college’s 22,000 students.

Several projects quickly unfolded. The most recent is the opening of The Village, seven college-owned townhouses located several blocks off campus, that can shelter up to twenty-eight homeless or housing insecure students. The Village is run by the college in partnership with Jovenes, a thirty-year-old organization that works with homeless youth in Los Angeles County.

“In the 2016-2017 academic year, we began to identify homelessness and housing insecurity as significant barriers for our students,” Fierro begins. “At that point, we formed a partnership with Jovenes. That year, Jovenes’s staff identified about eighty students who needed a place to stay, and they placed these students in market-rate apartments within the community.”

Fierro reports that Jovenes raised money from philanthropy and from county grants to pay the rent for those students, while helping them develop the life skills they needed to stay on track academically and work toward becoming financially independent.

That program—housing students in privately owned rental units—is still in place and is likely to be in high demand this fall due to the impact COVID-19 has had on low-income communities like Norwalk. Pre-pandemic, Fierro says that almost three-quarters of Cerritos’s students, 70 percent of whom are Latinx, and 55 percent of whom are enrolled part time because they also hold full-time jobs, qualified for California College Promise Grants, which provide two years of tuition and enrollment fees for those living at or below the federal poverty threshold: $24,690 for a two-person household; $37,650 for a household of four. 

Fierro is enthusiastic about Promise Grants and other scholarship aid, nonetheless he acknowledges that outside money is imperative in  keeping many of Cerritos’s programs afloat and allowing it to go above and beyond. “Over the last few years, we’ve accelerated our development work and have received a few large gifts, including $2.3 million from a former student named John B. Smith who died in 2015,” he reports.  

Fierro also credits Jovenes for its role in providing wrap-around services—including mental health counseling—to students. “The beauty of the partnership with Jovenes is that it allows us to focus on what we do best, providing academic services and putting students on the path to completing their education,” he says. “It also allows Jovenes to do what it does best, providing services to homeless young people.”

Andrea Marchetti, executive director of Jovenes, works with numerous community colleges in southern California to combat homelessness. “The investment in housing for students gives a real return in terms of graduation rates,” he says. “Students can dedicate themselves fully to higher education once they have a safe, affordable, place to live.”

Nonetheless, Marchetti says paying rents for students to live in market-rate housing is difficult to sustain long-term, which brings us back to The Village.

“The college purchased the property out of general funds,” Fierro says. “After the Trustees made the commitment to build housing for homeless and housing insecure students, we essentially just wrote a check, albeit for $4 million.” 

The entire project took eighteen months to complete. Each 1,500-square-foot unit has three bedrooms, a living and dining room, two bathrooms, and a laundry area. Eligible students, who must be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, pay anywhere from nothing to a few hundred dollars per month to live in the shared units, and they can stay until they graduate. “We can house students for less than half the market rental rate because we own the apartments,” Fierro says.

Johnny Wallace Jr., a political science major who serves as a student representative on the Board of Trustees, says that he is “proud of the bold way Cerritos helps students combat hardships.” When he and his family faced eviction, he says that he got support from the Umoja Student Success Program, a campus group primarily serving African American students. 

“I realized that I was not alone,” Wallace says. “In addition to peer support, the counselors also  helped with food, gift cards, emergency aid, and academic planning.”

Although Wallace is not living in The Village, he says that  he knows students who’ve been put out of their homes and forced to leave school. This he adds, underscores the importance of providing subsidized housing for students in need.

“We’d like to have enough funding to address the needs of every student experiencing housing insecurity,” Fierro says. But for now, he, Marchetti, and Wallace are hopeful that other community colleges will follow Cerritos’s lead and take action to address the reality of undomiciled students.

Several different models exist: The University of Washington-Tacoma has joined forces with the Tacoma Housing Authority to provide rental vouchers to 150 homeless/housing insecure students; the Massachusetts Student Housing Security Pilot Project is placing homeless community college students on eight campuses into vacant dorm rooms at area universities; and students at the University of California-Los Angeles have established Bruin House, the first homeless shelter exclusively for people in college.

They’re impressive efforts. At the same time, they don’t come close to addressing the extensive—perhaps unprecedented—needs of the estimated 58,000 college students that the Hope Center believes are already homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. 

“When housing is not provided to students who have nowhere to live, retention falls into the single digits,” Andrea Marchetti of Jovenes says. “But with housing support, retention goes way up, to between 72 and 75 percent. This shows that students can complete community college in two or three years when they are adequately housed and get other needed support services.”