With Financial Aid Declining, Many College Students Don't Have Enough Money To Eat, Studies Show, Even Though About 40 Percent Are Also Working (npr.org)

As students enter college this fall, many will hunger for more than knowledge. Up to half of college students in recent published studies say they either are not getting enough to eat or are worried about it. From a report: This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges, but it's common at public and private four-year schools as well. Student activists and advocates in the education community have drawn attention to the problem in recent years, and the food pantries that have sprung up at hundreds of schools are perhaps the most visible sign. Some schools nationally also have instituted the Swipe Out Hunger program, which allows students to donate their unused meal plan vouchers, or "swipes," to other students to use at campus dining halls or food pantries.

That's a start, say analysts studying the problem of campus hunger, but more systemwide solutions are needed. "If I'm sending my kid to college, I want more than a food pantry," says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia, and founder of the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. [...] According to a survey of UC Berkeley students, 38 percent of undergraduates and 23 percent of graduate students deal with food insecurity at some point during the academic year, Ruben Canedo, a university employee who chairs the campus's basic needs committee, says.

Comments

All of this was predicted in the 90s

[rsilvergun]

When I was in school. The right wing in America said it would be fine and the kids would just take responsibility and work their way through college like they did (ignoring that they all had higher wages adjusted for inflation and 1/5th the tuition). What drives me nuts is we all knew this was coming and just said fuck it. And all we got for it was some paltry tax cuts that expire.

Re:All of this was predicted in the 90s

[bobbied]

Until LEFT wing America started loaning money to college students in bulk, releasing the constraints on tuition costs and condemning students to a lifetime of debtors prison with nothing more than a "gender studies" degree to work from. What happened? Tuition rates went though the roof at a faster pace than inflation, schools built buildings and new campuses all over the place with the extra money, adding to their costs. All the while students and parents have been left holding the bill as debt.

This is a multi faceted problem. Stop looking at it in two dimensions.

By the way... The GI bill still pays out if you enlist. You CAN get though college nearly debt free if you are willing to do what it takes to make it happen. You may have to settle for a less well known college, spend your first two years at an inexpensive community college and work your butt off, but you can make it though college with a minimum of debt if you try. However, a lot of kids are loathed to work, prefer borrowing heaps of easy to obtain cash from the federal student loan program and will spend the next two decades struggling to pay the debt they so stupidly amassed.

Re:All of this was predicted in the 90s

[Train0987]

What was predicted is the entry of government-backed student loans would cause tuition prices to skyrocket, which they have (exponentially).

Allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, remove the gov't from the equation and watch tuition prices plummet back to reality.

P.S. it hasn't helped that so many public schools have turned into vacation resorts, with lavish housing, recreation facilities and luxurious administration complexes (while ignoring the classrooms and library facilities).

Re:Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope...it's a fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States#/media/File:InflationTuitionMedicalGeneral1978to2008.png

Supply-Demand-Price is a formula that comes to a natural balance. The demand for a degree was always high while the supply of available admission seats was low. Despite that, without the availability of student loan money that meant that you were either on scholarship, parents paying for it or you were working your way through it.

Student loan money changed the formula to "how much are you willing to borrow" and removed the price constraint on the supply / demand economics. If people can't afford to pay a particular price, the price CANNOT go up without leaving an excess of supply. By ensuring that anybody willing to borrow money could pay for the education, demand skyrocketed.

This isn't a false narrative. In 1978 Congress passed MISAA and in 1979 guaranteed banks a favorable return on the loans. The explosion went from there.

The EXACT same thing happened in the medical industry as employer sponsor insurance programs removed individuals from ever seeing the price for their health care options.

The moment that you provide an outside money source to separate consumers from the price of what they are consuming, price sensitivity goes away and the service becomes basic supply and demand with no price constraint. Every aspect of the US economy where this has happened has seen costs explode.

There's no narrative involved in mathematical outcomes.

Re:Not surprising

[Train0987]

That's just tuition. Most of the costs are hidden in administration fees. In Louisiana for example, there's a program called TOPS that gives free tuition to state universities for anyone graduating high school with a 2.5 GPA and an 18 on the ACT. That program began about 15-20 years ago. Since then tuition has increased 1000% (since taxpayers are now on the hook for it) and they've added a $5000 administrative fee to students that isn't covered by TOPS. That single-semester administrative fee is double what I paid for an entire year of tuition, dorm and meal plan in 1992. Meanwhile, all of that money has gone to resort-styling housing, ludicrous rec facilities (floating river pools, rock-climbing facilities, etc), administration buildings that resemble Fortune 500 executive suites, etc. The library is still falling down since I was there though. Not a nickel for that or the actual classrooms. Oh, and they've created an entire lobbying department with a staff whose sole job is to extract even more taxdollars from the public each year.

Re:What is it going to take

[plague911]

Yes and the rest of us STEM graduates take the business, law, marketing jobs from the poor B.A.'s who cant do jobs in their own studied industry. This is the reason STEM employment peaked at about 1/3 the unemployment rate of BAs.

Yes there are plenty of dumb degrees and people keep studying them. This is a major problem.

Re: What is it going to take

[dj245]

Welders can make 100k a year. The majority do not. The highest paying gigs are usually seasonal or temp gigs.