About one in eight Columbia residents lives in poverty, but you wouldn’t know that if you took U.S. Census Bureau data at face value.
That’s because the American Community Survey doesn’t differentiate between residents with low incomes and college students living in off-campus housing.
Those students may not have annual incomes greater than the federal poverty threshold, but they’re certainly not poor.
According to the new Census data, with no correction for the college students, Columbia’s poverty rate would be a striking 23.6%.
“The presence of college students tremendously impacts our poverty rates,” said Steve Hollis, the Human Services Manager for Columbia and Boone County’s Department of Public Health and Human Services.
Students living off-campus may live in situational poverty, Hollis said, but most are not experiencing generational poverty.
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development defines generational poverty as poverty that occurs in families where at least two generations have been born into poverty.
It is distinguished from situational poverty, which is defines as being caused by a sudden crisis and as often being temporary.
This phenomenon of off-campus students impacting poverty levels has been studied in depth by the U.S. Census Bureau. In an article from last fall, the Census Bureau explained that in some cases, the inclusion of college students living off-campus in census counts had a statistically significant impact on the poverty rates of those areas.
Boone County and Columbia even made Census Bureau lists of U.S. counties and cities where the differences in poverty rates including and excluding college students living off-campus was statistically significant.
Between 2012 and 2016, for example, the exclusion of off-campus students reduced Boone County’s poverty rate by 7.3% (+/- 1.5% margin of error), or from 19.3% to 12%.
Similarly, Columbia’s poverty rate was impacted by 10.5% (+/- 1.9% margin of error), or reduced from 23.6% to 13.1%.
Poverty thresholds are set each year and are determined by the number of people in a family, including children. The poverty threshold, for example, for a family of five, including three children, was $29,967.
To combat the impact of off-campus college students, Hollis said the figures city employees typically use to guide their work instead are those measuring poverty rates for children and families. Examples would be the number of children under the age of 18 living in poverty and the number of families with children under the age of 18 living in poverty. These numbers come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s ACS subject tables.
Columbia’s poverty rate for children under 18 from new 2018 ACS 1-year estimates is 17.9%, (+/- 6.6%). Most recent numbers from ACS 5-year estimates, which are the most reliable of all ACS surveys, estimated this rate to be 15.9% (+/- 3%).
Boone County’s poverty rate for children under 18 from 1-year estimates is about 15.2% (+/-2.6%). This number was 18.3% (+/-.9%) for Missouri and 18% (+/-.2%) for the United States.
The most recent five-year estimates (from 2017) report a 15.2% poverty rate for children under 18 for Boone County (+/-2.6%), 20.0% for Missouri (+/- .4%) and 20.3% for the United States (+/-.2%).
Boone County’s household poverty rate was 10% (+/- 4%), according to 2018 1-year estimates. Missouri’s 2018 household poverty rate was 15% (+/- .7 %), while the U.S.’ was 14.7% (+/ .1%).
Hollis also explained the methodology of the Boone Indicators Dashboard, a project that localizes data to Columbia and Boone County. Hollis noted that in cases where the margin of error is significant or in cases where an individual may be able to be identified, data is not included in the table.
Similarly, 2018 ACS 1-year estimates for Columbia in some cases reported a margin of error larger than the number reported, thus negating their use for analytical purposes.
Another measure sometimes used to examine childhood poverty rates in Columbia specifically is the amount of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, according to Michelle Baumstark, the Community Relations Director for Columbia Public Schools.
Baumstark said via email that about one-half of CPS students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and that the qualifications are set at the national level.
Eligibility requirements are determined based on family size. According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the “household size” figure includes both adults and children, so a family with one adult and one child would look at line two, for a two-person household.
The maximum annual income for a two person household to qualify for free meals, as of July 1, for example, is $21,983. This figure is $31,461 annually for a two-person household to qualify for reduced meals.
The number of Columbia households that received food stamps or SNAP declined by almost 2.5%, from 9.84% in 2017 to 7.44% in 2018 according to ACS 1-year estimates.
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January 05, 2020 at 07:00PM
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Off-campus students skew city's poverty statistics - Columbia Missourian
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