Wednesday, May 9, 2018

"10% of UC Berkeley Students are Homeless"

1 in 10 of these Berkeley students are homeless?
This is a lesson on how to brazenly lie with statitics.

Julia Galef wrote in a tweet:
I keep seeing ppl cite the stat "10% of UC Berkeley students are homeless"

Guys. Come on. This should *immediately* set off your BS alarm.

I found the original study & yup, they count you as homeless if you've temporarily stayed w/friends or relatives while looking for housing:
Galef then references a  June 20, 2016 Los Angeles Times article, 1 in 10 Cal State students is homeless, study finds.

From the article:
About one in 10 of California State University’s 460,000 students is homeless, and one in five doesn’t have
steady access to enough food,  according to the initial findings of a study  launched to  better understand and address an issue that remains largely undocumented at the nation’s public universities.
Here's the closest thing (Table 4) in the study that indicates any kind of measured data on "homeless" students. I have no idea how you would get the idea from this data that 1 in 10 University of Claifornia students are permanently homeless.
Table 4. Number of Student Responses to “Places you may have slept at night if you did not have a stable place to live in the past 12 months” 
  • Temporarily with friends, relatives or other people ("couch surfing”) WITHOUT parent 46%
  • Temporarily with friends, relatives or other people ("couch surfing”) WITH parent 22% 
  • In a car, tent, park, bus or train station, abandoned building, or other public space WITHOUT parent 11%
  •  At a motel, in a camper, or 5th wheel WITHOUT parent 8%
  •  At a shelter, WITHOUT parent 3 Transitional housing or an independent living program WITHOUT parent 2 %
  • Transitional housing or an independent living program WITH parent 2%
  •  At a shelter, WITH parent 2 %
  • In a car, tent, park, bus or train station, abandoned building, or other public space WITH parent 1% 
  • At a motel, in a camper, or 5th wheel WITH parent 1%

So if you want to lanch the big lie, just quote a weak poorly structured study with bunch of data on the topic but that doesn't come close to proving your point.

.r

2 comments:

  1. Although this is likely to be true post-graduation given the useless "knowledge" they imbibe while at the school.

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  2. ─ I found the original study & yup, they count you as homeless if you've temporarily stayed w/friends or relatives while looking for housing ─

    Remember this when someone says that immigrants receive inordinate amounts of government 'benefits'. You can see how easily it would be to claim that anything innocuous is a 'benefit', just like shacking up with roomies gets you labeled 'homeless'.

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