Miami Mortgage News

Behind the Problem of Student Homelessness

College students live on ramen noodles. College students couch-surf. These popular images can obscure more ominous realities: hunger and the little acknowledged problem that some do not have a place to live at all.“‘Homeless college student’ seems like a contradiction in terms,” said Paul Toro, a psychology professor at Wayne State University who studies poverty and homelessness. “If you’re someone who has the wherewithal to get yourself into college, well, of course you should be immune to homelessness. But that just isn’t the case.”It’s difficult to know exactly how many students are homeless, or are dangling dangerously close to it, in part because of the enormous stigma surrounding the issue. But new research shows how pervasive a problem it is — and one that some educators believe is growing.Continue reading the main storyLast month, the Wisconsin HOPE Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, released a study that surveyed students at 70 community colleges in 24 states. It found that 14 percent were homeless. Those findings build on a study released last year by California State University that estimated that 8 percent to 12 percent of its students were homeless. In 2015-16, 32,000 college applicants were identified as “unaccompanied homeless youth” on federal student aid forms, a number widely considered to be a low count.There are several possible reasons the problem appears to be so widespread, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, founder of the HOPE Lab and a professor of higher education policy at Temple University. One is that there are fewer well-paying jobs these days for those without a college degree. Only 11 percent of the homeless students she surveyed in the HOPE study reported making more than $15 an hour.

Ex-Professor Says Dismissed Racketeering Case Is Still ‘Devastating’

Next month will be the seventh anniversary of the darkest moment in Joy Laskar’s life.State agents for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Atlanta home and office of Dr. Laskar, then a celebrated professor of electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was eventually fired from his tenured job and indicted by a grand jury, accused of misusing university funds and other resources to benefit his private start-up. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a hefty fine.It all came to nothing.Last October, a judge tossed out the state’s case before a trial, ruling that the five-year statute of limitations had expired on the misdeeds that it had accused Dr. Laskar of committing. It was an unceremonious end to an episode that highlighted how entrepreneurial initiatives in academia can go very wrong.Dr. Laskar, who was the subject of a New York Times article in 2013, decided to speak publicly about the dismissal last week. He had previously remained silent to avoid antagonizing prosecutors, who still hold family items with sentimental value, like a laptop with the only copies of childhood photographs of Dr. Laskar’s three daughters and an unfinished novel by his wife.“It has been devastating personally, professionally,” Dr. Laskar said by phone, referring to the case against him. “It’s had a huge imprint on us as a family to this day. It will never go away.”Nick Genesi, a spokesman for the attorney general of Georgia, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Before he was ousted, Dr. Laskar had been a high-profile professor at Georgia Tech, where he brought in tens of millions of dollars in grants and research contracts from companies and government agencies.He started chip companies on the side, which Georgia Tech encouraged, eager to see successful university spinoffs that had showered riches and prestige on Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other top computer engineering schools.