Census study: College students inflate Clarke County poverty by 11.4 percent | Online Athens

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.

via Census study: College students inflate Clarke County poverty by 11.4 percent | Online Athens.