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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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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.
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.