With colleges spending billions on lavish housing developments, it’s easy to think that all students are living large. The sad reality? Student homelessness in higher education is a larger issue than most realize, with tens of thousands across the country homeless.
There are questions on the FAFSA (free application for federal student aid) addressing homeless students — or “unaccompanied homeless youth” as they’re officially called. Salon received numbers from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), who obtained them from the Department of Education via the Freedom of Information Act, as to how many students indicated homelessness on their FAFSA. Over 56,000 college students were homeless in 2013. As of early August, almost 46,000 college students declared homelessness for this year.
According to Justin Draeger, president of NASFAA, that number could be much higher. “One of the challenges we have with unaccompanied youth and homelessness is we’re trying to quantify something we don’t totally know,” Draeger told Salon. “It’s trying to figure out how many people don’t we know. We know they’re out there, but we can’t count them because they’re not applying for financial aid. So one of the challenges we have for this group is intervention early enough so that they understand that college is a possibility, it’s an opportunity for them and we can get them through the application process. So I would say the numbers don’t represent the full picture of unaccompanied youth and homelessness in this country.”