This article is part of our latest Learning special report. We’re focusing on Generation Z, which is facing challenges from changing curriculums and new technology to financial aid gaps and homelessness.

On a sunny day last April, Anthony White, a 29-year-old Marine Corps veteran, told a room of California state legislators how he had survived a semester as a cash-strapped student at MiraCosta College: he’d slept in his car.

Mr. White parked his Chevy Silverado late at night in warehouse lots, showering at his gym, and he was once kicked out of a Lowe’s for brushing his teeth in the bathroom. The experience, he said, was “traumatizing.”

Homelessness among American college students has become an increasingly visible problem, with those who attend community colleges hit the hardest. Seventeen percent of community college students experienced homelessness in the last year, according to a 2019 survey of close to 167,000 college students by The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice in Philadelphia. And half reported housing insecurity, paying only part of their rent, skimping on utility bills, or sleeping on friends’ couches and sometimes in their cars.