Researchers share insights, strategies to address homelessness among post-secondary students
Interviews with students revealed struggles with finances, stress and missed classes
A team of Canadian researchers studying homelessness among post-secondary students says more could be done to support struggling students.
After examining older surveys and hundreds of papers about the issue, the researchers interviewed 71 students who had experienced or were experiencing some form of homelessness between October 2022 and August 2023. The team also interviewed 54 staff members.
The team had their interviews coded, analyzed and combined into a Canada-wide dataset, though the bulk of interviews were from students and staff at the University of Alberta and Nova Scotia Community College.
Emily Berg, a PhD student at the U of A and a research assistant with the project, presented the team's findings in a virtual webinar on Friday morning.
She said financial precarity, job losses during the pandemic and an increase of domestic conflict or violence were the students' top reasons for experiencing homelessness.
"A lot of students mentioned that they were either staying in unsafe situations in order to keep a roof over their head or that they had left an unsafe situation, which meant they no longer had a roof over their head," she said.
Eric Weissman, an associate professor in social science at the University of New Brunswick who has researched the issue at multiple institutions, said students have been confiding in him for years about the serious problems they have been going through. In recent years, he said he has noticed an increase in concerns about housing affordability.
"We're really seeing this vulnerability so much higher now than it had been even when we started doing the work seven or eight years ago," he said.
The team's work was funded by Making the Shift, a social innovation lab funded by the federal government.
Almost all of the students interviewed reported feeling stressed and more than half said they had missed school because of homelessness or housing instability.
Kevin Friese, assistant dean of student health and wellness at the U of A and co-lead of the research project, said the team has created a toolkit for post-secondary institutions.
He said it addresses data collection, staff education, housing development and ways of streamlining support services.
Students and staff also shared recommendations with the researchers. They suggested reducing red tape for services, reducing the cost of on-campus housing, helping students search for suitable housing and hosting seminars for students on housing, finances and supports.
Nearly 40 per cent of interviewed students said they did not know about services that could help them.
"One of the things we heard time and again from students was just the lack of knowledge about information resources available, sometimes despite lots of information being out there," Friese said.
He said U of A has started working on campus-wide service awareness and de-stigmatization campaigns, shifting homelessness away from being seen as an individual failure to a community responsibility.
The university has also created a housing sustainability working group and recently rolled out a program where people purchasing access to food services on campus can donate a swipe for a hungry student, Friese said.
Berg told CBC News a final report on the team's findings should be released early in the new year.