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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.
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.
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Blame the Colleges.
Raising the cost two or three times the rate of inflation for 20 years will do that.
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.
It is an open secret that colleges are abusing the good will of the government and the students.
College professors are paid no better or worse than they were in the 1950s.
Tuition adjusted for inflation, the cost of tuition is well over ten times what it was then.
So, if the professors are not being paid more, the students are not using 10 times as many professors... where is the money going?
Well, I'm not going to get into that because everyone has short attention spans. It doesn't matter. The point is that the costs can come down dramatically if you squeeze the universities. A lot of administrators and non-essential spending can be cut without impacting the quality of education for the students.
We can see this in other countries that didn't permit this to happen by writing blank checks to the universities. Education pretty much anywhere but the US is dramatically cheaper without being any worse for quality.
The solution is not to increase financial aid. In fact, that is a large part of what caused this to get out of control in the first place. The Feds really need to stop throwing around money. It fucked up the housing market, it fucked up US health care which has gone through the same radical inflation in cost, and it has fucked up college education.
It is a financial feed back loop. Write the colleges a blank check and they'll just get a little bolder every year seeing how far they can push it. You can either put your foot down and do some solid accounting or let it bankrupt you. It is a feed back loop. It doesn't matter how much money you have. Eventually, it will beggar anything as it increases infinitely.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
this is a false narrative used to justify cutting funding. It's a straw man.
The loans were the result of out of control tuition increases. Those increases started when federal funding was slashed. That started with Reagan, continued with Clinton and didn't get any better under Obama.
We were _heavily_ subsidizing colleges to keep tuition low because mega corporations needed trained American workers. Outsourcing and H1-Bs eliminated that need and when that happened they cut funding. We could have stood up to them and kept taxing them to pay for schools but we didn't.
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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.
maybe it will solve the obesity issue
You joke, but maybe it will help pop the tuition bubble. State school tuition is something like 30x what it was when I was young - it's insane. The more money the government threw at the problem, the more universities raised tuition to vacuum up all that financial aid plus all the money they can from their students' families.
Like all bubbles popping, it's going to suck for a while. But university tuitions need to revert to something affordable when working part time, and that will never happen as long as the government funnels money though (some) students to the universities.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
given the productivity raises we've continually had in America. Productivity has doubled in 40 years yet real wages are down 14%. It used to be that as productivity went up pay and standards of living did. Americans should be making _more_ not less, but inflation takes 3-4% right off the bat. It's not surprising that educators would know enough to see this and demand a 3-4% raise to keep pace with inflation.
What _is_ surprising is that labor has gotten so weak that it can no longer demand that as the pie gets bigger they get a share of it. Hell, there was just a new story about how the 1% have finally have as much of the pie as they did right before the Great Depression. That's not a coincidence. We're heading for something nasty if we don't turn back...
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