For high school students born into low-income families, college acceptance letters have become proverbial golden tickets to a better life, social mobility, and career opportunities. The idea is a perfect analogue of the much-lauded American dream that anyone can be successful regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth — if low-income students just get a degree, they can leave poverty behind. What, then, are those same students to do when higher education requires going hungry?
Food insecurity, the chronic or temporary experience of being unsure where one’s next meal will come from, is a rising problem on college campuses. For some students, eating requires keeping an eye out for free food on campus. For others, purchasing academic supplies sometimes leaves them unable to afford a meal. Some students feel forced to rely on online dating, going on dates with strangers who they hope will pay for their food. In an article by The New York Times, one Stony Brook University student mentioned taking “poverty naps” to avoid spending money, choosing to fall asleep to help ignore the hunger pains in her stomach.
These students are not alone. Across the country, recent estimates put the proportion of college students that are food insecure at almost 50 percent. Addressing this problem will require making serious changes in federal and state policy.
The State of Students’ Food Insecurity
Recent data make it clear that food insecurity has become a widespread issue on college campuses. A report by researchers at The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice found that nearly half of students in two-year institutions and 44 percent of students in four-year institutions were concerned about running out of food. Almost half of all students reported being unable to afford balanced meals. Overall, 45 percent of respondents reported having been food insecure within the past 30 days, a proportion that is four times larger than the Department of Agriculture’s estimates of food insecurity within the United States as a whole. With 18.9 million students attending U.S. colleges as of 2018, food insecurity on campuses is a massive national problem.
Tremendous variation in numerical estimates of food insecurity at colleges has made addressing this problem difficult. Dr. Cassandra Nikolaus, a researcher at Washington State University, explained to the HPR in an emailed statement that current surveys for identifying food insecurity were not designed with college students in mind, which may lead to inaccurate results. For example, students may be hesitant to say that they eat less than they should if they come from households where they were able to eat even less. On the other hand, students may conflate an inability to afford healthy food with other reasons for eating unbalanced meals. Indeed, Nikolaus found that surveys report collegiate food insecurity rates at anywhere between nine and 75 percent. Although Nikolaus hopes that redesigning surveys will produce more consistent results that will lead to more informed policy, she noted, “Food insecurity among students should not be accepted, whether it is one in 100 students or one in three.” Students should not be forced to choose between learning and eating.
Demographic Shifts and Inadequate Government Support
Food insecurity on college campuses may actually be the result of a positive trend: the increased ability of “nontraditional,” low-income, and minority students to attend college in the first place. In the 2015-16 academic year, 47 percent of college students were nonwhite and 31 percent lived in poverty. Two decades ago, those numbers were 29 and 21 percent. Moreover, as few as 16 percent of today’s students can be classified as “traditional,” meaning they are full-time students who are between 18 and 22 years old, financially dependent on their parents, and living on campus. Higher education is more accessible than ever.
Accompanying this far more diverse pool of students, however, is a more diverse set of needs, necessitating systems to help college students find jobs, access government welfare programs, and eat. Professor Nicholas Freudenberg, director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, explained to the HPR that government funding shortages have prevented those needs from being met, fueling the rise of food insecurity.
Significant increases in the cost of being a college student over the past few decades, coupled with a decline in federal and state support for low-income students, have exacerbated the problem. Between the 2005-06 and 2015-16 academic years, tuition at public universities rose by 34 percent and tuition at private, nonprofit universities rose by 26 percent, after adjusting for inflation. Books and housing, as well as food and transportation, are becoming steadily more expensive as well.
The safety nets on which some college students rely have not kept up with those increases. In 1972, a Pell Grant, or a federal subsidy for college tuition, covered 80 percent of the cost of attending a four-year, public university and 100 percent of the cost of attending a community college. Now, those figures are 33 and 60 percent, partially because of a decrease in state funding for higher education — by 25 percent over the past 30 years — which has led to increased tuition. Freudenberg has written that, as a result, “much more of what it costs to run colleges and universities is coming out of the pockets of students instead of from taxpayers,” despite higher education originally being envisioned as a public good.
As the amount of money schools need to raise through tuition increases, they increasingly focus on attracting students who can pay full tuition and whose parents might donate money. That focus causes universities to cater more toward middle and upper-class students’ needs: “Many colleges have built gyms, fancy dormitories, expensive food services,” said Freudenberg. “They’re putting their diminishing resources into amenities rather than into meeting the basic needs of their most vulnerable students.”
Moreover, working no longer provides a viable path through college, since the value of the minimum wage has fallen significantly compared to the price of tuition. Financially-independent students must work full-time to be able to attend full-time community college. Freudenberg added that federal work study programs — which are designed to provide well-paying jobs for college students — are woefully underfunded and have not kept pace with inflation. Resources to which food-insecure college students should be able to turn are no longer doing their job, and the result is an epidemic of hunger.
Lacking Access to SNAP benefits
One of the biggest contributors to food insecurity in college environments is the difficulty of accessing SNAP benefits. SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps), is our nation’s first line of defense against hunger, providing funds each month to lower-income individuals and families to purchase food and other necessities. Troublingly, a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that of 7.3 million college students with household income below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, the cutoff for receiving SNAP benefits, only 3.3 million were actually eligible for the program.
A primary reason for the low number is rooted in history: During the early years of the food stamps program passed by President Kennedy, allegations of fraud were rampant. In particular, critics accused college students of benefiting from food stamps while still receiving money from wealthy parents, driving conservative legislation to push 80 percent of formerly eligible college students out of the program. Now, to be eligible for SNAP benefits, students are subject to stringent work requirements. Unless students work 20 hours per week, they are only eligible for three months of SNAP benefits out of every 36. Many employers do not offer that much part-time work, and such a large requirement is likely to conflict with school. It is unclear if those restrictions on eligibility were ever justified. Regardless, they have become yet another impossible burden for students who are already struggling to eat.
Furthermore, even students who are eligible for SNAP benefits might not apply because of the complicated application process, which, according to Freudenberg, is governed by rules that many student services workers and even SNAP officials do not completely understand. The GAO found that 57 percent of eligible students do not participate in the program. Overall, the Hope Center report suggests that only 20 percent of food insecure college students are actually receiving SNAP benefits.
Removing the work requirement from SNAP and streamlining its application process would make it easier for students to afford college by giving them more money for food. Pouring more funding into public education and the federal work study program, as well as increasing the size of Pell Grants, would also achieve this outcome. Thus, policy reform will be required to stop students from going hungry.
Battling the Stereotype of the Hungry Student
A refrain of both college students who choose not to take advantage of support resources and those unaffected by food insecurity who try to rationalize it away is that college students are meant to be hungry — a harmful stereotype. In fact, the precariousness of food insecurity, which pushes people to eat low-cost, calorie-heavy foods, is dangerous for anyone; it is correlated with diabetes, obesity, and depression. Additionally, studies show that food insecure students are more likely to have lower grade-point averages, graduate late, and/or drop out of school when compared to their food secure peers. The reason is simple: You cannot learn on an empty stomach.
And yet, many students are still unable or unwilling to take advantage of programs, like campus food banks, designed to alleviate food insecurity. On campuses with a food bank, only 38 percent of food insecure students utilize the resource. Some cite inconvenient hours, insufficient information on use policies, social stigma, and the feeling that “the food bank was not for them” as their reasons.
That is why Nicole Edmonds, director of the Michigan State University Food Bank, has made it her mission to combat the stereotype. Open to all MSU students and scholars, hers is the oldest student-run food bank in the nation. In a year, the food bank serves about 6,000 students and their families and distributes more than 110,000 pounds of food. Edmonds, a dietitian, explained in an interview with the HPR that there is no reason for college students to be hungry and that they should not have to think about food while they are in class. The stigma that surrounds food insecurity — the idea that asking for help is a sign of weakness and that college students are supposed to survive on granola bars — prevents people from accessing help.
Edmonds thus works not only to provide students with food but also to educate the MSU student body about food insecurity. Through posters, messaging, and peer-to-peer communication, she raises awareness about food insecurity and decreases the surrounding stigma, spreading the message that using a food bank is not shameful and that it is temporary. According to Edmonds, the message is working: “When people actually understand what it means to be food insecure, it takes away from some of the stigma that people may face when going to use a food bank,” leading to increased food bank use and less hunger.
Despite over 700 food banks in the College and University Food Bank Alliance catering to the needs of food insecure students on campus, fear of embarrassment and lack of awareness remain huge obstacles to depleting food insecurity through their use alone. As Freudenberg remarked, food banks “are not the long-term solution … but they are part of the solution, especially when they’re used as hubs to connect people to other, more substantial services.” Though universities and campus student organizations are stepping up to meet the challenge of food insecurity admirably, they should not and cannot be responsible for combating student hunger — they are not designed to prevent hunger and lack the resources to do so. Thus, federal and state action to combat student hunger is necessary.
Long-term Solutions
Everyone benefits when low-income students are able to take full advantage of our higher education system to become more productive members of our society, so our government should do everything in its power to ensure that they can succeed. There are a number of steps that ought to be taken to make that possible.
The first and most obvious solution is expanding federal welfare and assistance programs to enable easier access for students in need. Second, the government can tackle food insecurity head-on by providing meals for students who cannot afford them on campus. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) recently introduced the Food for Thought Act, which would allocate funds for community colleges to provide free meals to students in need. Both of these solutions could help eliminate collegiate food insecurity.
Ultimately, though, the rise of food insecurity points to the need for our society to grapple with the twin issues of too much wealth inequality and too little social mobility. “The reason so many people in this country are poor [and unable to afford food] is … a really sharp increase in inequality from moving wealth, through tax policy and economic policy, from poor and middle-class people to wealthy people,” Freudenberg said. Until our government addresses that inequality, food insecurity is not going away.
Image Credit: Wikimedia/Tony Hopkins
