1 in 10 California State University students is homeless, study finds

LOS ANGELES - About 10 percent of California State University's 460,000 students are homeless, and about 20 percent don't have 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, said Cal State, the largest public university system in the nation, needed to deal with 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.”

Across the country, the number of students who don't have enough to eat largely is undocumented and unknown, and the number of homeless students tends to be underreported in national surveys, said Clare Cady, who led Oregon State University's program to support homeless students and is now addressing the issue on a national level with the antipoverty nonprofit Single Stop.

More than 56,000 college students identified themselves as homeless, according to 2013-14 Federal Student Aid Form data.

Students with unstable housing conditions are not required to say so, and many are reluctant to seek help because of the shame associated with homelessness, said Rashida Crutchfield, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Cal State Long Beach, who led the first phase of the study.

Crutchfield, who began her research in April 2015, interviewed 92 students and conducted four focus groups at urban and rural campuses. She and her team also sent out surveys, reviewed existing resources and asked university staff, faculty and administrators for their impressions of the level of homelessness on their campuses.

Many students and faculty members, she said, were unaware that the definition of homelessness extended beyond living on the street. Some students who couch surfed or lived in their cars, for example, did not consider themselves homeless.

Initial findings indicated that an estimated 8 percent to 12 percent of Cal State's students are homeless, and 21 percent to 24 percent are food insecure, she said.