Flawed Poverty Numbers in College Towns

Read this one by the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"The Census Bureau counts low-income college students who live off campus as poor - even if their parents pay their expenses. That describes a majority of the nation's college students who do not live in dormitories and who earn less than $9,800 from working in the summer or part time during the school year.

Whether in Berkeley, Calif., Ann Arbor, Mich., Provo, Utah, Gainesville, Fla., or Bowling Green and Columbus, Ohio, students in apartments and rented houses - the kids in college neighborhoods everywhere - are wildly inflating poverty rates.

This might merely be one for the joke books but for this: The government uses poverty figures to dole out money for anti-poverty programs. Census poverty numbers, no matter how inflated, go into the Department of Housing and Urban Development's formula for awarding Community Development Block Grants, a $3.7 billion program."

More here.