NPR has a recent article about the growing number of college students who are facing homelessness because of the tough economy. UCLA student Diego Sepulveda had to get creative about his housing situation after he lost his job at Subway:
Nearby sofas offered a few hours of sleep. Sepulveda would rotate — a night at the library, the next two nights on friends’ couches. His other part-time home was the Student Activities Center, where there’s a pool, a locker room and showers.
“I would shower, and it would give me at least some sense of being clean,” he says.
I don’t doubt that a number of students are going through economic hardships, but my first reaction is that being homeless at a premier school like UCLA has a lot to do with a lack of resourcefulness. If this student went to a campus administrator and explained his situation, about how much he wants to graduate and how hard he has been working, would the administrator really say, “Tough sh**, buddy.”
I’ve been fortunate enough to not have to worry about finding money for rent every semester, so I’m open to the criticism that I haven’t really been in this kind of situation and I don’t know what I’m talking about. But a school like Cornell, at least, I really feel that the university would much rather provide a student with some sort of subsidized housing in a free dormitory room or university-owned fraternity than let him or her wander around campus looking for creative places to sleep at night. According to the article UCLA has even “created an Economic Crisis Response Team to try to identify financially strapped students and help keep them in school.” I assume that “keeping them in school” involves more than giving out brochures about prime snooze spots on campus.
But who knows, maybe I’m completely wrong. As you might remember, Cornell has its own problems problem of homeless students a homeless student.
