Many parents who send their kids to college want to know that their children will be in stable housing.

A 2022 report that surveyed students at historically Black colleges and universities shows that more than half of students said they struggled to maintain safe, affordable, and consistent housing.

Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville, Tennessee, has a plan to address the issue. Decommissioned shipping containers are being retrofitted into dorm rooms for the 2023 fall semester.

Fisk University Executive Vice President Jens Frederiksen says a trustee brought the solution to the table as an affordable way to help the university house its growing population.

"The reality is we've grown so fast,” Frederiksen said. “Enrollment has grown roughly 41%-42% in four-and-a-half years."

The inside of each container will have a bed, lounge area, kitchen and bathroom.

"I think the beauty of it is you can actually stack them up to levels of four is what we had originally looked at,” Frederiksen said. “These are stacked in levels of two. So you could basically upload two more containers on top and create a total of 200-bed availability."

It's not an entirely new idea. The College of Idaho was the first school in the nation to transform shipping containers into dorm rooms in 2020.

Frederiksen said students like how it's a sustainable solution. Sophomore Gift Eni says sustainability is very important to many students.

"It's repurposing something that was old and making it new," Eni said. “As soon as the videos dropped, like they did the tour of the inside and we were all 'I don't know how we apply to this, but I need to apply to it immediately. I need to be living here like yesterday.'"

Frederiksen said other universities are already reaching out with interest in doing something similar.

With real estate prices continuing to soar nationwide, he said creative solutions to house students are necessary.

"Real estate prices are, at this point, a prohibitive factor, which then means students to live off campus would live 35, 40 minutes away," Frederiksen said.

"I feel like it makes school more accessible,” Eni said. “That's important. And you have to be able to get to school on time when you need to be here."

The only challenge now is deciding who will be the first to live in the shipping containers.

"I think to date, we've probably had 30 prospective students who called and said, 'If I choose Fisk, do I get to be in the containers?’" Frederiksen said. “And we're like, 'No, we can't leverage that as a decision-making tool'. The reality is we're going to end up doing some kind of lottery."

 

Rural hospitals across the country are in a difficult spot right now. COVID-19 is hitting them harder than many metropolitan hospitals as they deal with issues of lower staffing.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, about 20% of our nation’s population lives in rural areas, yet less than 9% of our nation’s physicians practice there.

Add on the fact that according to CDC data, COVID is killing rural Americans at a rate 3.5 times higher than those living in metropolitan areas, and this issue is affecting staff and patient care.

“I’m very worried about rural health care because rural health care is teetering on the brink right now,” said Dr. Kurt Papenfus, an ER doctor at Keefe Memorial Hospital in rural Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. “There’s a darkness in this illness that I can’t say I’ve said about any other illness.

In late October, Dr. Papenfus contracted COVID-19 as he was traveling back from the Northeast to visit his daughter.

“I was very cognizant and was wearing a mask at all times, social distancing, and washing my hands,” Papenfus said. “But I remember having this thought on the train that this is a super-spreader event.”

When he got home, Papenfus got tested and was confirmed positive for COVID-19. The diagnosis put Keefe Memorial in a tailspin as he served as the only ER doctor in the small 25-bed hospital.

“We are a trauma level four hospital so keeping that physician on staff 24/7 is what we are required to do,” said Stella Worley, Keefe Memorial’s CEO. “And it is getting to be more of a challenge to have hired physicians out here in rural [America].”

Within minutes of learning of Dr. Papenfus’ COVID-positive diagnosis, Worley was on the phone with several different hospitals working to find a replacement. Within a few hours, they had settled on a former ER doctor who moved to another hospital in Texas a few months prior.

After she agreed, Keefe Memorial paid the doctor to drive 10 hours from Texas to Colorado and fill in immediately as Papenfus recovered at home for the next two weeks.

“Worst-case scenario is you would have to divert patients if there’s no one in the door to care,” said Worley.

Populations in rural America tend to be older, poorer, and less insured than the nation at large, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Since 2010, hospital closures in rural America have been growing as there have been 118, including 17 last year.

The closures only exacerbate a growing lack of health care coverage in rural America, said Dr. Dan Derksen, a rural health care expert and family physician

“Once a critical access hospital (25 beds with a 24/7 emergency department and at least 35 miles from another facility) closes, they almost never come back,” he said.