Related Links

• Affordable College, Unaffordable Living: Innovative Housing Solutions for Community College Students
• Affordable College, Unaffordable Living: How Community Colleges Develop Student Housing
• Richmond Fed Community College Wraparound & Student Services Survey

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guests today are Davy Sell and Anthony Tringali. Davy is a research analyst and Anthony a research associate, both with the Regional and Community Analysis team at the Richmond Fed. Welcome to the show.

Davy Sell: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Anthony Tringali: Hey, it's wonderful to be here.

Sablik: We've talked about challenges in the housing market on the show quite a bit over the years. We've also done several episodes on community colleges and the variety of services they offer, most recently with Stephanie Norris and Matt Wells talking about workforce development programs for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated.

Today's show combines both of those two topics. We're going to be chatting about community college housing, which both of you wrote about in a recent Richmond Fed Community College Insights blog. To start off, what got you interested in this topic?

Sell: I started my career in residential mortgage lending, where I had a focus on first-time homebuyers. I did a decent amount of grant work supporting affordable homeownership. As I transitioned into the research space, I served a year in the AmeriCorps VISTA program run by the Virginia Housing Alliance. That program prioritized ending homelessness and expanding affordable housing as well. I also previously had the pleasure of working with the Virginia Center for Housing Research out of Virginia Tech, who concentrate on data-driven analysis to improve housing affordability. So, for me, this was really a mix of different research interests when Anthony and I started looking into how exactly community colleges are serving their students' evolving housing needs.

Tringali: My mom worked in residential mortgage lending, so I remember from a young age learning all about housing, homebuying. When I studied economics in college, I was really intrigued with the economics behind housing and the rental market. So, I got to work on a few projects that dealt with housing and rental affordability while I was in college. I'm basically asking, how do we track housing and affordability and what are some of the solutions to tackling these sorts of issues?

Sell: The Fifth District in particular is really interesting, specifically for housing development. While approximately a quarter of the community colleges across the nation have housing that they can offer their students, I think the number when we ran it for the Fifth District was 2 percent — it might be three total schools in our five states. So, it's a very different dynamic here than, perhaps, other places in the country.

Tringali: Yes. When we were in Arkansas for the expansion of the Survey of Community College Outcomes, almost all of them have on-campus housing in their system. So, it differs by state.

Sablik: Great. So, we'll dive right into some of your findings in this piece that you wrote. How does the student body at a typical community college differ from the one at a four-year institution?

Sell: Four-year institutions typically have a majority of students that fall into this traditional student bucket. These are students who start college in the fall semester, directly after high school. It's their first time at any postsecondary institution. [They are] typically enrolled full time and often they're dependents of their parents.

Community colleges generally have a more varied profile of students. This includes a larger demographic of adult learners, specifically students 25 years and older. Typically, these are people who are likely to have already been in the workforce, and they may be more focused on career advancement or career change.

There's also a higher proportion of student parents attending community colleges. Based on a recent report by the SPARK Collaborative, there were over one and a half million student parents enrolled at community and technical colleges in 2020. Our colleagues, Laura Ullrich and Jason Kosakow, recently published an article on our Community College Insights blog about this particular group of students. It goes a little bit more in depth about how community colleges support these students in particular.

Tringali: What we discovered when we were researching this — and from anecdotal experience, too — is that the definition of a typical community college student is shifting. For example, community college students used to be considered commuter students, who either could live at home with their parents or they were far enough in their career and could support themselves and just drive to school and get to school from wherever they were. However, that isn't necessarily the case anymore, and sharp increases in housing costs and low supply have created strains that challenge the conventional notion.

Sablik: Continuing on that thread, Anthony, what are the typical housing needs of community college students?

Tringali: With any big, complex issue like housing, there are many different needs. However, I would say probably the biggest need for community college students right now is simply that there isn't enough affordable housing.

Whenever there is a shortage, there is competition, which drives up costs, which I'm sure you know all about from this podcast. To complicate matters, community college students sometimes have lower median incomes than traditional four-year students. This means that they have less wiggle room, so to speak, when trying to find a place to live. That puts these students in a difficult spot. They can either choose to pay more in housing or try and look further away. And then, if they look further away, as you know, that can lead to other challenges like access to reliable transportation or increased commute times.

Sablik: So, what have you learned from your research about how community colleges connect students with housing?

Sell: One way we have seen colleges connect their students with housing, of course, is providing their own student housing. Approximately a quarter of community colleges across the nation have institutionally controlled housing, either on- or off-site, that they can offer to their students.

However, when that is not an option, we have also seen schools offer innovative solutions to their students' housing burdens by partnering with local housing agencies to provide things like Section 8 vouchers or even rental subsidies. By leveraging these community partnerships, it also allows their students to take advantage of the housing agency's expertise to help them navigate the local rental market.

Sablik: So, let's say we have a community college where their student population has maybe changed, their needs are changing, and maybe they're interested in offering more housing. What are their options?

Sell: One option that community colleges have is to establish or expand any partnerships that they have with those local housing agencies. These collaborations can really help colleges provide affordable off-campus housing options without putting too much additional strain on their staff and resources. While partnerships can provide more immediate support, we've also seen community colleges come up with longer-term housing solutions using a variety of different strategies.

For on-site housing, ground leases are an interesting opportunity for schools who have underutilized land like parking lots or vacant buildings that may be good candidates for development. A ground lease allows a school to keep ownership of their land while offering private developers the chance to construct the housing. This can be a really good partnership opportunity for the schools when they may not want to take on that debt themselves or the undertaking of developing student housing but still want to maintain the ownership of the land long term.

We've also seen a school in the Fifth District build off-site housing by establishing an education foundation that is affiliated with the school. The separate entity creates distance between the school's finances and the debts that are taken on during the development process. It also gives the community college more options with the income derived from that property since it's held apart from the institution, and it isn't held to the public funding restrictions that the school may have.

While providing students with housing continues to present distinct challenges, community colleges are doing what they do best by finding creative and community-based solutions to serve their students.

Sablik: Compared to four-year institutions, do community colleges face any sort of unique hurdles when it comes to trying to provide housing?

Sell: Early in the episode, we spoke a little bit about how the student populations differ among the four-year and the two-year institutions. Those differences lead into some of the difficulties experienced by the community colleges in the housing space.

A typical four-year dorm model has a lot of shared living spaces — shared dormitories, shared bathroom facilities, often dining halls. While this typically works well when the student's age and family profiles align, it is much less effective when we start factoring in older student populations, as well as students who are married or if they have children.

Often, these students would be better served by an apartment model where there is more privacy. It allows for in-unit kitchens and bathrooms. But, of course, this increases costs and space requirements for housing. It also introduces the unique issues of the community college needing to figure out how exactly they're going to house non-student occupants in their housing model.

In addition to the complications of serving this wide range of students, community colleges also have some unique policy hurdles that can be prohibitive to them housing their students. The community colleges may not hold ownership of their campus, which would prevent them from having the authority to develop or lease the land without permission from the property owner. Oftentimes, that's a state community college board or a county that the college serves.

Financing, of course, is a common hurdle for development anywhere. [While] four-year universities may leverage financial bonds as a way to raise money, community colleges can have further restrictions that require them to get additional approvals, which makes this a much more difficult funding strategy for them.

As demands from the students and communities evolve, housing remains a conversation for community colleges and their legislators to determine what the best path forward is.

Sablik: So, what else are you hoping to learn about this topic?

Tringali: Well, as much as we can, Tim. We are currently fielding the Richmond Fed's Wraparound Services Survey, which asks community colleges across the United States about support services like child care, food pantries, and the aforementioned housing that they offer their students. It closes on June 27, so if you are listening and you work in student support and want to fill it out, visit the Community College Initiative page on the Richmond Fed website to learn more.

Sablik: Davy and Anthony, thank you so much for joining me today.