Equity Gaps and Student Basic Needs: A Call to Social Work Educators

Overview: This interactive workshop is relevant for social work faculty and administrators at any level. We will discuss the prevalence and impact of basics needs insecurity on our campuses, promising practices, and the unique role for social work faculty in working to address these challenges in our classrooms, campuses, and communities.Proposal text: Higher education is becoming aware of basic needs insecurity among students (Crutchfield & Maguire, 2018; Hallett, Crutchfield, & Maguire 2019; Khosla et al., 2019). Though a primary mission of higher education is student success, many among our student populations are contending with homelessness and hunger. Research suggests that lacking stable housing has a significant impact on student retention (Crutchfield & Maguire, 2018, 2019; Hallett, Crutchfield, & Maguire 2019). Further, it is clear that these social problems disproportionately impact marginalized populations (Crutchfield & Maguire, 2018). Social work educators are in a unique position to support efforts to address basic needs insecurity in classrooms and on campus. Educational equity aligns with our discipline’s principles of social justice, dignity and worth of the person, and capitalizes on social work skills in working within ecosystems, collaborating, and connecting people with resources.

To truly address academic, economic, and social equity gaps for marginalized students, social work educators must have a clear understanding of the responsibilities and challenges their students manage outside of the classroom while learning how to support them within their educational environments. Although there are some policies and practices in higher education designed to help retain students at risk of stopping out of higher education, there are few retention supports specifically for students who lack basic needs.

Research suggests that students who experience basic needs insecurity struggle to meet a variety of competing needs, including management of personal and financial responsibilities while navigating college (Crutchfield & Maguire, 2019; Gupton, 2017). Students experiencing housing and food insecurities have higher levels of stress and are often in the precarious position of having to sacrifice their well-being in the pursuit of their education (Cady, 2016). Further, state and federal programs intended to support low-income individuals and families, like SNAP, often fail to help struggling students because of restrictive eligibility requirements specifically for students.

In line with the conference theme, the goals of this pre-conference workshop are to raise awareness of college student basic need insecurity as an issue of inequity and offer approaches to build equity and inclusion of these students in our programs and institutions. Social work faculty are uniquely positioned to serve as collaborators and leaders in these efforts. We will summarize research and connect those ideas to a definitional framework for understanding how basic need insecurity manifests in universities, highlighting the largest studies that explore basic need insecurity in higher education. We will discuss practices for supporting basic need security and encourage development of strategies. Finally, we will discuss methods for social work educators to support postsecondary institutions in their response to student needs.

The presenters will share examples of efforts on their specific campuses to understand and address basic needs insecurity. This will include an exploration of the development of single points of contact programs, the use of research to develop a university system wide movement, and a campus-wide grant project that included a needs assessment, pilot intervention, and faculty learning community centered on student success and basic needs insecurity.