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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.
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.
For people to wake the fuck up and realize that short-term profit-driven ideology is not going to work in the long term while sacrificing investment in and opportunities for young people. Future societies will hold the American system in almost all things as a cautionary tail rather than as the triumph it could have been.
Blame the Colleges.
Raising the cost two or three times the rate of inflation for 20 years will do that.
Some went on to have amazing cardiometabolic damage and lower cognitive function:
"Ramen noodles are particularly unhealthy because they contain a food additive called Tertiary-butyl hydroquinone (TBHQ), a preservative that is a petroleum industry byproduct. They're also incredibly high in sodium, calories and saturated fat."
"according to a new study by Baylor University researchers. If you eat a lot of ramen noodles, your risk of metabolic changes linked to heart disease, diabetes and stroke rise considerably."
How many college kids lived off of ramen noodles -- especially in tech -- and went on to do amazing things?
And how many did not or got sick? I remember those days when very often I'd survive with a muffin and a cup of coffee a day. It shits on your health, and then your grades. My college A-streak plummeted when I got my first C in trig - I had a serious bout of bronchitis on that semester (in no small part by not eating well), which seriously screwed me up. It was then that I started taking student loans (yeah, now I can eat some more and buy nyquil.) I shit you not.
I knew people back then that simply had to drop. I knew college students with broken shoes or health problems because of financial reasons.
We can all say "yay these kids survived on ramen and went on to invent the new mywhorefacebookgramspace", but many others fall through the cracks (not to mention the many more that crack even earlier in HS.
I could understand this is if we were in a 3rd world country. However, we are not. Not only are we in a rich country, we are in the richest one ever. This state of affairs, and the glamorization of it, it is atrocious and non-productive. This grind doesn't produce grit, it kills our potential social capital.
Currently, there is no pressure to keep tuition costs in check. That is, consumers are not price-sensitive. No matter what you are charging in tuition, loans and aid will cover it. Education loans are also not discharged in bankruptcy, so there is no reason to turn borrowers down based on their estimated ability to repay. It is all-around failure to apply market principles that resulted in inefficient and very expensive system. Tuition prices will not come down until there is a market pressure to do so. More aid will only make this problem worse.
Downstream of "$150,000 loan for gender studies undergraduate degree" is reduced quality of life, reduced lifetime wealth, and overall economical drag from less available income from consumers. If anything, these loans should have a California's mandatory cancer warning label attached.
Yes, we all know the right wing dominates the education sector and runs the universities. You can barely find a left wing lecturer or employee at a university...
Let's face it, if there's something wrong at universities it's entirely the fault of the left. It's the left's fault standards in education at universities are so appallingly low, it's the left's fault that students can't handle criticism or debate, and it's the left fault that they universities they run are charging such absurdly high fees.
We have young people saddled with debt during the most productive years of their life. All so rich people can get a tax break they don't need. This is wrong.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
What kind of statement is that even? Like are you seriously expecting there to be some sort of data collection of what students ate in the past versus what they made in the present? What exactly are you trying to get at here? Are you trying to apply a stereotype to draw some conclusion like "all college kids eat diets of only ramen, some college kids become successful, ergo, an all ramen diet cannot be all that bad"? Do you understand how nonfactual, illogical, and just plain wrong that kind of basis for an argument is? And finally, using your loose argument for college, it would be more than fair to point out that a lot of tech giants dropped out of college as well, so I guess we should conclude that college isn't necessary? Which I do hope you see that, that argument is also equally flawed. We should not take a few successes as evidence of some underlying truth. That's not building a fact based argument.
GI bill. Yep. Good idea. Sign up to commit murder or be murdered at the whim of a bunch of psychopaths in DC. The military isn't a summer camp -- once you realize what it actually does, the idea becomes less attractive.
My daughter got a full ride scholarship four years ago. The first year cost of very little since all of her food was paid. The next year they changed the food plans that caused her to be short toward the end of the year. Last year I started putting fifty a week in to her bank account so she would be able to eat when she could, due to the collage shutting down several of their little kiosk food nooks. This year they are replacing all of those with food trucks and her vouchers don't add up to three meals a day for the duration of her last year.
Added into that, she has been audited for three years in a row despite the last two times they found nothing wrong. All the while insisting its 'random'. She is still lucky in that she had the grades to get through collage without a crushing debt at the end.
This situation is attributed to a new chancellor who immediately spent five million on renovating his house and then doing more renovations the next year. He also wants to get a football team going. Its clear that collages do better without them. The quality of the students who are there to learn is superior to the meat heads they will get with football around.
Most students don't get a gender studies degree. In fact, the vast majority of students don't get a gender studies degree. That's like a rounding error.
Woosh!
My point here is why are we loaning money for useless degrees? We have more "gender studies" and law degrees than we need right now and not enough STEM graduates, yet we loan money for all of these using the same rules and rates. Which is an illustration of how stupid this idea is. But the real problem is the unrestrained tuition prices. Nobody cares all that much, they can borrow to pay it... Never mind how long it will take to pay it off.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Educating children and young adults was _always_ this expensive.
Bullshit. Costs have skyrocketed. You're saying government paying in keeps costs down. That's absurd. It just means a chunk of the cost is paid for by the government. The government doesn't magically erase that cost. The government has stepped back because NOT EVEN THE GOVERNMENT can justify the absurd spending increases.
More students. Lower standards for admission, graduation, and conferment. Less value to any degrees conferred. Increasing administration salaries. Increasing faculty salaries. Mainly flat staff salaries. Administration growth far outstripping student growth. Faculty and staff growth tracking fairly flat with student growth.
And they keep expanding and building new buildings in some very expensive real estate areas with tons of red tape for any sort of construction. It's so bad that in California, the University of California has focused almost entirely on out-of-state and foreign students, since they can charge them more tuition. The state said "Fuck you!" to that, finally, and now there's a cap in place with regards to the number of out-of-state and foreign students vs. in-state students. But the campuses with the highest ratio of foreign and out-of-state students are grandfathered in, so they don't ever have to reduce their ratio despite it being above the cap. Guess which campuses those are.
The UC argues that they need more money for each student. Faculty just got a 3 or 4% raise. Union staff got raises. Non union staff got raises.
If you give a school a dollar, they'll ask for a dollar fifty.