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Ask Slashdot: Hungry Students, How Common?
Gud (78635) points to this story in the Washington Post about students
having trouble with paying for both food and school. "I recall a number of these experiences from my time as grad student. I remember choosing between eating, living in bad neighborhoods, putting gas in the car, etc. Me and my fellow students still refer to ourselves as the 'starving grad students.' Today we laugh about these experiences because we all got good jobs that lifted us out of poverty, but not everyone is that fortunate. I wonder how many students are having hard time concentrating on their studies due to worrying where the next meal comes from. In the article I found the attitude of collage admins to the idea of meal plan point sharing, telling as how little they care about anything else but soak students & parents for fees and pester them later on with requests for donations. Last year I did the college tour for my first child, after reading the article, some of the comments I heard on that tour started making more sense. Like 'During exams you go to the dining hall in the morning, eat and study all day for one swipe' or 'One student is doing study on what happens when you live only on Ramen noodles!'
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
Feed me!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
...because no one wants to tell you about those, of course not - who wants to admit they didn't make it after all of those hardships?
I took an education in Animation, very VERY expensive, cost me a HUGE fortune (which I took up a loan for, and worked in a computer store to pay off), did I end up working for Disney? No. Despite winning TWO FILM AWARDS - I still didn't get a job with Pixar or the likes, why? Did I suck? No - I just didn't have the right connections, and I didn't even understand how important it is to have the right connections, and NOT to piss off the wrong people.
I spent the next 10 years paying of my study debts, I'm finally free. But I don't regret anything, if I didn't do it - I'd spend the rest of my life wondering how things would have turned out if I did it, if I really just took the plunge and went for it. Well - I did...and it didn't turn out as I expect it.
But you know what? Everything you learn in life - you'll eventually get some use out of, I use my former education to work in advertising, using my animation skills in a technical sense, earning my living that way. Nothing is ever 100% black & white.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Sure, the 'best' schools are there, but who cares if you're walking the edge of malnutrition in order to pay for class, gas, and books? Emigrate to an actual civilized country instead of a pretend one.
... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
If someone still owns a car and has a place to live they are not poor. I have know students so poor that they are homeless.
...if you don't have the means and/or resources necessary to live comfortably during that period AND you're not willing to make the sacrifices necessary otherwise - then don't go.
Seriously, wtf is up with people thinking that they should get everything they want all the time?
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But it sounds like an absurd example of a false economy: Even at relatively cheap schools, the cost of running a student through is nontrivial. It seems like complete insanity to waste expensive instructional time on somebody who can't concentrate properly for want of a few dollars worth of calories. Nobody's interests are well served by that.
A starving student with a car?! I think we've isolated the problem.
I finished my CS PhD about 10 years ago at a top-20 US university. My first year I was not paid, but after I hooked onto an advisor later, I received an RA or TA position for $23k/year, and in my last few years, I received a fellowship for about $40k/year.
That first year was horrible. I recall eating spaghetti and ketchup, and I distinctly remember having to ask one of my rich friends for a $500 loan just to pay my rent one month. That was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, and it really shaped my financial planning. Now, 10 years later, although I'm making well over $150k/year, I keep my expenses very low like I'm still a grad student, and I always have at least 6 months' expenses in short-term accounts.
NCAA Approves Unlimited Athlete Meals After Hungry
I don't know about other states, but in Virginia you can go to community college and then get a guaranteed transfer to a 4 year state university if you have at least a 3.0 upon graduation. If you live near Virginia and your state schools are subpar, then all you have to do is move to the town where you want to start, declare residency and apply after one year to the community college to get in state tuition. Want to go out of state and find it a burden to pay $25k/year instead of deferred gratification of one year for less than $5k-$7k/year? Only got yourself to blame. It's not fair, but I doubt most of the world's poor would cry a single tear for you due to your inability to wait one year to save $15-$20k/year.
I subsisted on Ramen and chicken pot pies because they were cheap (4/1$ for Ramen, 2/1$ for chicken pot pies). Even the cheapest dollar meal at the local fast food didn't have as many calories. But, no, I didn't worry about food all that much.
First thing is to learn to cook. It's generally cheaper to buy family portions and make your own than to buy individual meals. For example, a bag of rice is $10, but can act as bulk in many meals such as fried rice, chicken & rice, steamed rice with butter & onions.. Yeah, doesn't sound too appetizing, but it can be. Fried rice, for example, is easy to make. For about 20$ worth of ingredients, you can have 10 meals. Just need rice, an egg or two, onions, salami/pepperoni, etc.. You can buy a pack of miso for around $4. Add firm tofu ($3) or chicken chunks ($4) and dried seaweed ($3) and you can make soup for 10 people. Buying a bulk pack of 50 tacos will set you back around $10; add a couple pounds of beef (10$), lettuce (2$), cheese ($5), etc., and you can feed 10 people for $50 or so.
Next, use coupons and shop of two-for-one days. You can easily save 50% of your bill just by using coupons and shopping on the right days. Avoid individual meal items such as can soda and even White Castle burgers.
You can also show up at friends/relatives around dinner time but use that only as a last resort unless you're really tight with them. Make friends with someone who works at a pizza shop. I knew a guy in college who would take leftovers from the restaurant. At a Denny's, for example, he'd order a coffee. When people were about to leave he'd run up and ask if he could have their leftovers. Bizarre, but he saved a few bucks. He's also gotten pretty wealthy since those days so I guess it paid off. I figure that one day he'll find a way to end up in jail just so he could get a free meal and bunk. :/
Oh, and forget about corned beef. Back in my day it was cheap, around $1.50 a can. Now it's close to $6 a can. I remember many days eating corned beef and cabbage, corned beef and scrambled eggs, steamed corned beef, corned beef sandwiches. No more.
It's like Dave Ramsey says: if you're broke, then eat "beans and rice, rice and beans." It's easy and cheap, even in a dorm.
1. Rice cookers are like $10-20. Get one with a steamer tray. It doesn't have a burner and can't start a fire, so tell your RA to fuck off.
2. Buy rice at the Asian store. It'll cost $1/lb for good Jasmine rice (brown rice only, you'll need the nutrients). (You don't have an Asian store? My ass. Or try the Mexican store. You don't have a Mexican store, either? Shut the fuck up and stop lying. Open your eyebulbs; they're everywhere.)
3. Buy bullion cubes and/or soup base (it comes in a jar) for flavor. You can get that stuff cheap at the Asian store.
4. Buy beans in a can from Save-a-Lot/Aldi/cheapo-store. I like navy beans and fava beans. There're a few dozen other kinds. Get what's cheap. One can a day, minimum.
5. Put the rice, soup base/bullion/soup mix and water in the rice cooker and press the button. Add the beans when it's done. Enjoy.
6. If you're feeling rich, chicken or sausage or burger patties go in the steamer tray.
7. The Asian store will also have cheap noodles that the rice cooker will cook just fine. Cheaper than ramen. (You still need the beans, or you'll eventually get something nasty like beri-beri.)
8. Oatmeal and raisins make a good, fast breakfast. (Add sugar packets and creamers from wherever other people get coffee.)
9. You'll also need to add some vitamin C every once in while to prevent scurvy. Any fruit or fruit juice will do. Tea made from fresh pine needles (actual pine trees only) will do in a pinch. I like raisins, apples, bananas, and oranges, which are all usually cheap enough.
You can actually live on that stuff for months at a time without dying. The soup base/bullion and occasional noodles and meat will keep you from committing suicide.
If you can't make ends meet, I suppose you'll have to cut something, or you'll get stuck in debt.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
right now. But wages have been in decline for 30 years. A little mis management is one thing (Mitt Rhomney was famously so broke at one point he had to sell the stocks his dad gave him to make ends meet :P ), but we're getting to the point where it's impossible to "work your way through college".
For one thing, when we say "Wages Adjusted for Inflation" we mean inflation as a whole, but the cost of food and shelter (what college kids spend most of their money on, jokes about Ramen & Natty Lite aside) have gone up much faster than inflation. The sort of job you can hold while in College is gonna pay $8-$15 an hour depending on where you live. I know ppl at that income level working part time because the economy sucks and they made mistakes. They're not making it, and somehow I doubt the added expense/stress of school would help them, especially after they graduate with $150k in loans... If you're one of those super humans that doesn't need sleep and can go to class and the work 8 hours then spend 8 hours doing homework you might make it. Everyone else will just drop out. The consoles tell you this when you apply, and a lot of the big majors (Math, CS, MIS, Medical) won't take you if you're working full time.
What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't "work" for it?
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Grad school was historically and is supposed to be the sort of thing not everyone does. It is for people who are really interested in a field, who want to start doing some original research (under the umbrella of a professor's overall research) and so on. The sort of thing only for those that are truly interested in pursuing the subject more deeply and pushing the boundaries.
Also most fields don't require graduate degrees. There are some that do (like lawyers), though usually they require a PhD or other advanced degree after it (like professors, medical doctors, etc). However for most an undergraduate degree is all they are after.
However where I work, I see a ton of students that go in to grad school that are hoop jumpers. They see it as the next thing, that will get them a better job. They aren't that interested in the work, and don't have a particularly good understanding of it. They take comprehensive exams instead of doing a thesis, and so on. They try and use more time in school to make up for a lack of talent.
So, if you are thinking of grad school, and it'll be any kind of financial hardship ask yourself: Why am I going? If it is because your field requires it, then ok no problem. Gotta do what you gotta do. If it is because you really love the field and you want to go to a higher level, that's good too, but just understand it'll be a pain financially. If it is "because I'll get a better job," then no, stop right there. That's not a reason to go to grad school, particularly if it is going to be a problem financially. It probably will NOT get you a better job, and will just give you more debt.
"What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't 'work' for it?"
If inheriting property is a legitimate idea, what about all of humanity inheriting our collective know how and so being entitled to some of the fruits of our global productivity? ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization.
One way to implement that:
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm pretty sure Europeans are more worried about the US starting the next war.
I'm pretty sure that Russia has fixed that problem for the Europeans able to make a reasoned judgment that might have actually believed that. The ones that still believe that tend more towards viewing the world with a constant filter applied and it will take an actual occupation or perhaps bombing to adjust it.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I bet the only ones posting in here are going to champion how they made it, and how they, in fact, didn't starve, and how great they are.
College was the worst years of my life. All the stress and starvation just made me a very angry person. I still see that I am right, that there is literally no remorse or accommodation for someone trying to focus on studying and learning instead of "get a job you worthless piece of garbage".
These are the two options for those coming from very poor parents in a small town (and being white, ugly, male, and peasant clothing):
1) work menial service job and waste away.
2) work menial service job and go to college (and starve).
I am not trying to troll. I can just see the writing on the wall with no sympathy:
1) Why have __ when you should be eating food? You need to prioritize better. No sorry, need car to get to menial service job, remember?
2) Some bullcrap story from the 1990's or earlier that somehow supposed to be equivalent to the last 16 years of economic hell.
3) I made it by doing _ . You should follow this winning formula. Absent differences in city, luck, personality and circumstances.
4) All that starvation was good for you.
5) That you didn't make it was all your own fault.
6) Spoiled children... blah blah blah.
7) Some euro-centric view of the world that is only intended to bash the United States.
That the smart people on here won't come up with actual solutions (technological or otherwise) is not going to be surprising. Yes I made it, yes I graduated, but then it was a year without a job in the field. And all the stress and bad eating wrecked my digestive system. Also took a thin person and made him fat, with an affinity for gobbling up any extra calories and anything free.
What about taking a slower look?
Ezekiel 23:20
http://frugalliving.about.com/...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Leafy greens especially are really important to preventing many diseases. Cabbage is a fairly cheap one. You can steam the cabbage while cooking the rice. Dandelions are a terrific source of healthy greens (if they have not been sprayed with weedkiller etc.). It's crazy that people have been taught to hate healthy Dandelions.
Our stainless steel "Miracle" rice cooker with a steamer attachment was one of our best kitchen investments ($70) as it does not have Teflon as most rice cookers do, but we worked up to it from cheaper Teflon ones.
Without good food, the mind and body can go into a downward spiral of low energy and depression -- thus a cycle of poverty. Hunter/gathers are more than 100 different types of food over the course of a year. Getting calories in not enough -- you need micronutrients too, and that means a diversity of foods -- but they don't have to be expensive foods.
Of course, so many sick care schemes (Medicaid, Medicare, "health" insurance) will pay for expensive drugs and surgeries but won;t pay for good food to avoid drugs and surgeries. It doesn't help that stressed-out people tend to bulk up on calories as an ages old survival mechanism, not knowing where the next meal may be coming from. This is all made worse by US farm policy:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes....
"Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Watch out for additives in bullion that might cause headaches and such. Lots of bad headaches could make it hard to keep a job or graduate from college.
Beans are also cheaper to buy dried than canned -- except you need to know how to prepare them and have a place to cook them and the electricity or gas too cook them, which together may not be possible for many students.
People need a healthy source of fat, too -- something lacking in what you outline. The brain is mostly fat, so it is no wonder on low fat (or poor fat) diets that people can get messed up mentally. Nuts can be one, but they tend to be expensive and they may be lacking in Omegas 3s. Eggs might be a good cheap choice of fat including some Omega-3s for many people; some other sources:
http://www.self.com/blogs/flas...
Eating vegetarian in general is healthier and cheaper. So is buying the right things in bulk, maybe splitting big purchases with others.
We also got a lot of value from a $100 blender to do smoothies from frozen fruit -- but that is beyond very cheap (although still cheaper and much healthier than a carton of ice cream).
Still, something like a "basic income" may be a needed as a general solution to poverty. The problem with a lot of frugal advice is that it forces people to take on various risks (like health risks of lack of vegetables, or safety risk of a cheap car, or assault risk in a bad neighborhood, and so on). Or it entails doing a lot of time consuming things that prevent more productive activities. Your advice though is very time-saving and practical, which is why I like it (except for quibbles on some of the above points as far as long-term living).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You don't really spend a lot of time working with EU military, do you?
I had my share of work with various armies of this planet. Including Russian, various European countries and of course US. Without wanting to start a flame war, but if the average US soldier is about as motivated, trained and bright as the people I had to deal with, waiting for the US to bail the EU out is NOT really something that I'd consider a sound strategy...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's got nothing to do with "socialism". Quite far from it. What it has to do with is completely fucked up tax and tax money politics in Germany. There is a very easy fix for it: Stop bailing out banks, stop pumping money into bailout funds for high risk investment banks (actually, tax the fuckers 'til it's no longer profitable to leech the industry to death), stop destroying the middle class and instead tax capital gains more and you're set.
Of course, nobody really wants that. Especially not "Mutti". And as long as you keep voting that ... thing in, no pity from this side of the border.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just to clarify, how do student loans work in the US?
In the UK, they're provided by the government, and they don't work like conventional loans. They come directly out of your salary, and only once you start earning a certain amount. Even then, the amount scales depending on how much you earn, to the point where you may never even finish paying it (if you hit age 50 it just gets dropped completely).
Whilst admittedly I still live at home, I can afford a car with literally thousands to spare, and have never met anyone personally who has financial issues relating to being a student.
Based on all of the comments I'm reading here, my assumption is that in the US, student loans work more like conventional bank loans, where repayments are a fixed amount regardless of earnings?
I'm in grad school right now.
1) I know grad students who are struggling financially
There are at least two people in my program (of about 100 total) who I know personally who are struggling to make ends meet. Their families aren't well off and our program doesn't have funding. They're getting along OK, but they have to live very very tightly, skipping any extra curricular activities, not buying text books, and budgeting both money and food.
I assume that others may be struggling and I don't know it.
2) More of us miss out on things so we don't have to starve
A good number of us work full time or more to pay for things. I've had to not participate in school events both social and scholastic, including guest speakers and class outings. It is very difficult to see a teacher during office hours since I'm supposed to be at work.
I'm not missing out on food, but if food were available I might be able to work less and be more involved.
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The funny thing is, I'm hearing the exact opposite complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
I don't know? Personally, I suspect the REAL issue is just a high unemployment rate overall. We're all stuck in a "buyer's market" when it comes to those doing the hiring, so expectations and requirements are very high, and opportunity to get hired is low. No matter where you're at on the education and/or skills ladder, it's difficult to get hired right now. So people begin tossing out accusations, trying to explain why they can't get jobs.
I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years myself, and yet I don't have a degree. (I'm one of those people with "some college", meaning a few classes shy of an Associates' degree.) I've *definitely* encountered my share of jobs I was passed over for because someone really considered the degree of prime importance. Yet I don't think my track record for employment is really any worse than my counterparts who did have the 4 year degrees. Yeah, some of them earned $20K - $50K/yr. more than I did, especially during the dot-com boom era.... but in the long-haul? A lot of them lost those high-paying jobs when budget cuts or corporate mergers came around and they had to accept less to get back into the ranks of the employed. Others just got burnt out on I.T. completely and changed careers.
Meanwhile, I don't have all the college debt they had to pay off, and since my salary has been relatively steady for the last decade or more, I didn't get so caught up in the thing of moving to a more expensive area, buying a large house, etc. -- only to have to give it all up when times got rough.
There's a key difference though between the "old guys" like myself and people trying to get a start in I.T. today. I think most of us who lived and breathed computers in the 80's really got into it when it was still a hobbyist's world. Corporate America wasn't even really looking at home computers as more than a passing fad, or something to just "keep an eye on, in case it eventually became useful". When you bought a computer ,you got a 200-300 page manual you had to read, cover to cover, to learn how to make it work. You might have shared knowledge with a few friends you made who owned the same machine, or joined some computer club in town. But all in all, you had to be really motivated to learn it, hands-on. Otherwise, why even waste time with it? My college courses in anything resembling I.T. were largely a joke. Either I knew way more than the professors did, or the courses went in depth on something I didn't know much about because truthfully, it DIDN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of I.T.
These days, I think colleges have figured out much more about what people actually need to know to be successful in I.T. -- and you actually *can* take classes and learn really useful material. At the same time, I see a lot of younger people who seem to be just as "into computers" as I was growing up, but they focus on much different things; social media, web sites, mobile device apps, and MMORPGs that can really suck up a LOT of one's time. It's all pretty cool and entertaining stuff -- but won't translate that well to a career doing network or systems administration, working as a PC support specialist, or systems analyst.
Potatoes are 10 cents a pound here.
"Learning to live poor" is the most education that people get in college. They have money... they just don't know how to manage it properly.
Yep, pretty much this. Students should learn to get by the same way adults do. Make a damn budget and stick to it (granted, this is getting rare among adults too). But do that math and get creative stretching your bucks.
Found a handful of dependable roommates and rented rickety 100-year old houses with them, which were a lot cheaper than apartments and university housing. We took turns cooking for everyone. We ate well. We'd do a grocery run once a week and shop carefully... fresh or frozen meat that was under $3/lb., lots of pasta, rice, veggies, etc.. Drank tap water, mixed with that frozen juice from concentrate when we wanted something fancier. I pretty much stuck to ~$40 a week for groceries (in 2000 money), and maybe augmented that once or twice a week with trips to one of those heaping Chinese "any two or three" stir fry takeout places for $3-$5 per meal. Plus, I would volunteer to staff the ASME coffee shop in the morning while doing homework, which was good for a bagel or two per sitting. And of course stake out the extracurricular activities that had free pizza.
Is it just me, or are you bitching that an American going to Norway won't get free education in English, when a Norwegian going to US is not only going to have to pay exorbitant money for university tuition but also can completely forget receiving lectures in Norwegian at any US university, even despite the exorbitant cost? I mean, what did you think about European universities, that they have all been built for Anglophone people? "Isn't worth it"...typical. Well, I guess all those tales of the "monolingual pride" of Americans were true!
Ezekiel 23:20
It's not necessarily laziness but another symptom of the oversupply of labour. When there's a 100+ applications for every position, it's impossible to evaluate them without resorting to data mining techniques. And at that point, if your application is not Search Engine Optimized, for example if you lack a diploma, sucks to be you.
The underlaying problem is that our current economic model, and our model of employment as its subset, is based on the needs of the Industrial Era, which is ending. Capitalism is breaking down just like Feudalism before it, and whatever will replace it hasn't emerged into the mainstream yet. The question is: how long and painful will the transition be this time around?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Hi there, I'm an American who studied in Finland for free, and the process of going there to study was pretty effortless. Even if I spoke no Finnish (or Russian, my field's lingua franca), my department was happy to let me concentrate on language learning for the first year or two before moving on to my real coursework. University of Helsinki is full of foreigners, some of which never really learn Finnish, so your claim that the language is a real barrier doesn't wash.
As for having the money to study here, beyond there being no tuition fees, nearly all non-EU foreigners who come to study in Finland get funding (800€ a month, not luxury but sufficient) and housing for their first year as a matter of course. With a year's head start, one then has plenty of time to find some part-time employment or scholarship for the following years.