The COVID-19 Pandemic, Student Housing, and the University of Chicago
A Podcast by Alina Brennan, Jonah Norwitt, Hope Houston, Daniel Avila, and Weixi Hu
Disclaimer: This project was completed for pedagogical purposes for an undergraduate sociology course at University of Chicago. While we are sharing results from our mini-project with the public, it is important that readers understand these are NOT findings from a human subjects research project intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge.
This year has been met with a large amount of uncertainty for undergraduate students as they have been forced to make decisions based on constraints induced by COVID-19 pandemic, their respective universities’ responses to the health crisis, and managing personal and familial finances. The pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study how familial socioeconomic opportunity constricts or expands a student’s ability to succeed as they continue their education. In this study we ask,
“How has the pandemic, coupled with each individual’s socioeconomic status, affected a student’s decision of where to house themselves in 2020, in order to optimally succeed in school?”
SES & Student Housing at UChicago During COVID-19
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LITERATURE REVIEW
To provide context for our study, we conducted research into the ways that the nation has attempted to address socio-economic disparities within higher education prior to the pandemic. By utilizing a hearing from the “U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training on Improving College Access and Completion for Low-Income and First Generation Students” (2016), we are able to glean historical problems that need to be addressed at a national level for low income and first generation students. We found guidance in defining concepts such as social and cultural capital from Dr. Jenny Stuber’s ““Class, Culture, and Participation in the Collegiate Extra-Curriculum” (2009). Through the lenses of social and cultural capital we can understand the effects they have on low-income students relative to high-income students. These concepts enlighten findings in the U.S House Subcommittee hearing as well as allow us to understand some of the qualitative data we received from our interviews.
While separating the raw data from the individual stories is important for the purpose of determining trends and conducting quantitative analysis, the qualitative changes experienced by our survey subjects provides insight into the stress, uneasiness, and insecurity experienced by an increasingly debt burdened portion of the population. Finally, concepts defined in articles such as “College Residence and Academic Performance: Who Benefits from Living on Campus?” (Turley, Ruth & Wodtke, 2010) and “The Latest Crisis: Low-Income Students Are Dropping out of College This Fall in Alarming Numbers” (2020, Long, Douglas-Gabriel) were used to directly understand the housing crisis caused by the pandemic and exacerbated by university policies. Through these various articles, studies, and opinion pieces, we are able to tie together the rising numbers of students not returning to university, the inability for universities to reliably house their returning students, the way socioeconomic class has affected who has the opportunity to return, and the social distancing required by the pandemic.
METHODS
Survey
Student Interviews
After receiving 56 survey responses, we contacted students who were open to being interviewed, especially focusing on students from low-income backgrounds. These interviews are designed to expand upon the responses received and to ask additional questions to determine how different factors affected students and their decision on where they chose to live during fall quarter. We found that certain students from similar SES backgrounds provided insight into their personal situations that helped us look more broadly at and create generalizable social trends. We generated interview transcripts and analyzed them with an inductive coding method to find common themes and processes. Due to the pandemic changing the landscape of higher education so violently, previous literature did not provide satisfactory references on what themes to expect. We believed that finding themes from the interviews, rather than using previously-generated research, would help us get a clearer picture of the current reality.
College Bound St. Louis
Additionally we conducted an interview with Scott Baier, the CEO of College Bound St. Louis. College Bound St. Louis is an organization that helps lower income/first generation students navigate the college admissions and college experiences. By utilizing Mr. Baier’s perspectives, we can take a targeted approach to understanding the institutional deficiencies that have required outside support for low income/first generation students while grasping the change in necessary resources for underprivileged students that has occurred due to the pandemic.
Analysis
The survey and interview data did show similarities between SES groups. Some unexpected consistencies included large majorities of every group reporting that technology availability, travel costs, fear of getting COVID, and difficulties receiving aid were all not significant factors in their housing decision. All students reported staying in their housing for significant stretches of time, feeling lonely, and having lower motivation and concentration. Additionally, there was a consensus around inadequate communication and badly timed announcements by the university. Outside of these similarities, students faced very unequal challenges around their housing.
Results
Works Cited
1. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training Edited by Superintendent of Documents §. Serial No. 114-13 US Government Publishing Offices, (2016). Accessed October 16, 2020 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED572222.pdf
2. Heather Long, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel. “The Latest Crisis: Low-Income Students Are Dropping out of College This Fall in Alarming Numbers.” The Washington Post. WP Company, September 18, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/16/college-enrollment-down/.
3. Turley, Ruth & Wodtke, Geoffrey. (2010). College Residence and Academic Performance: Who Benefits From Living on Campus?. Urban Education – URBAN EDUC. 45. 506-532.
4. Anthony Abraham Jack. The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=2007526&site=eds-live&scope=site.
5. Stuber, J.M. (2009), Class, Culture, and Participation in the Collegiate Extra‐Curriculum. Sociological Forum, 24: 877-900. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.01140.x
6. Rubin, M., Denson, N., Kilpatrick, S., Matthews, K. E., Stehlik, T., & Zyngier, D. (2014). “I am Working-Class”: Subjective self-definition as a missing measure of social class and socioeconomic status in higher education research. Educational Researcher, 43, 196-200. doi: 10.3102/0013189X1452837338.
7. Thomas, David R. “A General Inductive Approach for Analyzing Qualitative Evaluation Data.” American Journal of Evaluation 27, no. 2 (June 2006): 237–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098214005283748.
8. “UChicago Empower.” College Admissions. Accessed December 4, 2020. https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/empower.
9. “U.S. Department of the Treasury.” The CARES Act Provides Assistance for State, Local, and Tribal Governments | U.S. Department of the Treasury, December 1, 2020. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/cares/state-and-local-governments.
10. Yi, Erika. “Themes Don’t Just Emerge — Coding the Qualitative Data.” ProjectUX (blog). Medium. July 23, 2018. https://medium.com/@projectux/themes-dont-just-emerge-coding-the-qualitative-data-95aff874fdce.
11. Zimmer, Robert. “Autumn Quarter 2020 Plans.” Email, 2020.