According to Wisconsin's HOPE Lab, housing insecurity is defined as "includes a broader set of challenges such as the inability to pay rent or utilities or the need to move frequently. All of these challenges affect students, and the results this year suggest that it is more common to endure them during college than to have all of one’s needs met." Homelessness is defined as "a person is without a place to live, often residing in a shelter, an automobile, an abandoned building or outside."
Across the nation, the HOPE Lab found that 36% of university students were housing insecure within the last year. They found that 9% of university students were homeless, and 16% of university students experience both food and housing insecurity.