Will students sleep on the streets?

On a hot late-summer day, I moved a young woman and her baby into their new home in Buffalo. She’d been living in an overcrowded apartment in the Bronx, but she couldn’t afford the rent. She’d lost her welfare and childcare because she had a bit too much money in the bank — from a worker’s compensation suit — though not enough to offer her any stability.

She wouldn’t be allowed into the New York City shelter system as long as she was living in that apartment — her and her baby in the bedroom, her landlords with their baby in the living room. It was a bad scene, one she couldn’t afford anyway. Legal Aid said the only way she could get into a shelter was if she called the cops on her illegal landlords, one of whom was also a college student, rendering them homeless themselves. 

That June, she’d graduated from community junior college, which meant her work-study money was all gone. And she had a place waiting for her at John Jay. She was on the Dean’s list; an ambitious criminal justice student. But there was no place for her to live. So she took her state student grant, chose a university with a family dorm, child care center and a criminal justice program and moved away from everyone she knew to enroll in Buffalo State.  

Her dorm became her new shelter.  

It may seem like an unusually heartbreaking story, but it’s not. A Temple University and Wisconsin HOPE Lab study of homeless students, the largest of its kind ever done, involving more than 43,000 students at 66 institutions, found that nearly one in ten college students said they were homeless in the last year. 

At state schools, in the Ivy League, at every college, you might dream of for your kid, or yourself. And every one of these students has their own heartbreaking story of struggle and perseverance and crisis and ambition in a country defined by vast inequality.

Before this pandemic began to bloom, I interviewed homeless Columbia students over summer break, when the dorms were closed. A few were working the night shift in Butler Library so they had a place to go. That work-study job was also how they fed and clothed themselves. Another student was picking up guys so he to crash at their apartments in exchange for sex. He was counting down the days until dorms opened again. 

All of these students had public schools to offer them social services and stability and meals when they were younger, schools which are now debating closure. New York City public schools track the name number as college students. One in ten students are homeless; 144,000 kids in total. Nationwide, 30 million kids are homeless. They know what stability and shelter are worth. They know what college is worth, too. 

Our wide population of homeless college students are often the first people in their family to achieve the marker of matriculation which was once considered elite and is now required for any living-wage job. It’s worth more than a degree. It’s a roof and heating. It’s a paycheck. It’s a separation, to a point, from poverty.

As Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, the State University System of New York — and over one hundred other colleges — announce they’re clearing out campuses this week, in many cases, locking up dorms and dining halls as well as classrooms, in a measure to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, a different kind of plague is ignored. 

University closures force homeless students to the street, to shelters, to overcrowded apartments, or to family homes roiling with abuse. Governor Cuomo has rightfully said that SUNY dorms will remain open for students with no other place to go, in his state where over 90,000 people are homeless; making up almost one-fifth of the country’s unsheltered population. 

Imagine what it took to get into college while struggling in family poverty. Imagine getting sent back there. Imagine our country where these stories are commonplace and define not just our present calamity, but in these kids, our future hope. You don’t have to imagine it. It’s already here. 

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist. She is the author of three books, including “This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home.”