Dallas College students who are evicted more likely to drop out, not return

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Study reveals how evictions cause harmful, long-lasting effects to students’ education, job opportunities and earning potential.

Dallas College students who are evicted are more likely to drop out and less likely to re-enroll than students who weren’t evicted, according to a new study by the Dallas-based nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab.

CPAL’s study with Dallas College reveals how an eviction can have harmful and long-lasting impacts on young adults’ educational and financial outcomes.

“The big findings are that students who had an eviction filing while they were enrolled were much less likely to ever earn a credential,” said Camille Gilchriest, Dallas College’s Director of GIS and Data Visualization. “If you have an eviction filed against you while you’re enrolled, your odds of ever earning that credential are very slim.”

Dallas College students who don’t have eviction filings earn a credential at about 7.5 times the rate of students who do have an eviction filing, Gilchriest said.

“That’s a large gap,” Gilchriest said. “So they received that eviction, and they had to deal with it. And that’s the last time we saw them in Dallas College.”

The study measured the relationship between evictions and two key metrics: persistence rate, or the percentage of students who remain enrolled and don’t drop out, and retention rate, which is the rate at which students re-enroll.

Dallas College students who faced an eviction had a persistence rate 60% lower than the first-time students cohort; the eviction cohort also had a 50% lower retention rate compared to the first-time students cohort.