College students distort Clarke County’s poverty rate by almost 11.5 percent, knocking down an unsettling statistic but not erasing it, according to a recent study by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The distortion is the second greatest in the nation of counties with populations greater than 100,000, but even that rate makes Athens-Clarke the most impoverished county in the study. The greatest distortion is in Monroe County, Ind., home to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, with a drop of 25.5 percent to 13.8 percent.
Clarke’s rate is 38.3 percent when college students living off-campus — dormitory residents are not accounted for when poverty rates are determined — and not living with family are included; it falls to 26.9 percent when they are removed. Both are the highest poverty rates in the 105-county study.
The U.S. poverty rate is 15.2 percent, according to the study, dropping to 14.5 percent once off-campus college students are excluded; Georgia’s rate goes from 17.8 to 17.1 percent.
The Census Bureau defines poverty for a one-person household, with no children, as earning less than $11,945 a year. For a family of two adults and two children, the poverty threshold is $23,283 a year.
Matt Hauer, public service associate with the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government and head of its applied demography program, called the data interesting, but not surprising.
“Most college students aren’t earning any income, so naturally they’re going to massively inflate the poverty rate,” he said. “College kids aren’t necessarily poor. … (P)lacing someone who is a college student and someone who is poor in the same universe is just silly.”
Cash coming from sources such as grants, scholarships, loans and family isn’t included in earned income when determining poverty rates, Hauer said.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, Athens-Clarke County has the third-highest poverty rate in Georgia when off-campus college students are included; using the rate calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, Clarke falls to No. 47.
“It’s something that you almost always see, a high poverty rate in a college town,” Hauer said. “So when you pull out a mitigating factor … you end up with a better picture of what a poverty rate actually is.”
The U.S. Census Bureau’s study concludes that college town planners may want to exclude students from poverty measurements to paint a clearer picture of local poverty rates.
