BY HANK REICHMAN
Proponents of the “completion agenda,” which strives to ensure that more students graduate from college, often fail to recognize a major reason that students fail to succeed or drop out: food insecurity and hunger. The problem has been highlighted on this blog (see, for examples, here and here) and by a growing number of faculty members like Temple University’s Sara Goldrick-Rab. (Actually, there’s no one quite like Goldrick-Rab, whose work on this issue merits the highest praise.)
Now the federal government’s General Accounting Office (GAO) has weighed in with a new report on “Food Insecurity.” “Nationally representative survey data that would support direct estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity among college students do not exist,” the report said. But the GAO conducted a review of 31 studies, 22 of which estimated that more than 30 percent of students are food insecure. Of these, 29 studies were based on campus surveys, with results ranging from insecurity rates of 9 percent to over 50 percent. These include surveys in California which “found that 40 percent of respondents from University of California campuses and 42 percent of respondents from California State University campuses experienced food insecurity.” (I previously highlighted the California studies here.)
The report “also analyzed National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) data from the 2015-2016 academic year, the most recent year available, to estimate the prevalence of risk factors for food insecurity among college students.” In addition, the report notes,
we conducted site visits in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Michigan. We selected a geographically diverse group of states where colleges or state SNAP agencies were actively addressing food insecurity among college students. In selecting these states, we reviewed literature and asked researchers we interviewed about colleges and states that were actively addressing food insecurity on campus. In each state, we met with administrators, faculty, and students at selected 2-and 4-year public colleges and with officials from the state agencies that administer the SNAP program and other relevant organizations. Overall, we contacted 14 colleges—seven 2-year and seven 4-year colleges—that were actively addressing food insecurity among their students.
According to the report,
the 14 selected colleges we contacted are addressing student food insecurity in three main ways: by educating faculty, staff, and students; by providing students free food and emergency assistance; and by centralizing and coordinating their student services and helping students apply for federal and state benefits. Officials at 9 of these colleges said that they viewed student food insecurity as part of students’ increasing inability to meet their basic needs as a result of the decreasing affordability of higher education or the high cost of living. This sentiment was echoed by selected students we spoke with during discussion groups.
The federal government could address the problem through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly known as food stamps), the report found, but “almost 2 million at-risk students”—defined as students who are low income or first generation, are raising children, or have another, similar risk factor—didn’t receive SNAP benefits in 2016, even though they potentially could have. Of students with at least one risk factor for food insecurity who were eligible for SNAP, 57 percent did not report participating in the program. Another one-quarter of 5.5 million low-income students with at least one additional risk factor for food insecurity did not meet any of the student exemptions allowed under SNAP and would likely be ineligible to participate in the program. Although “federal grant aid is available to help low-income college students and their families pay for college, . . . for many students, the maximum amount of grant aid available to them does not cover all of the costs associated with attending college,” the report concluded, a point that Goldrick-Rab and many others have been making for some time.
Moreover, “the gap between the amount of financial aid available and what it costs to attend college is continuing to grow.” According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the report said,
the average Pell Grant used to cover more of the cost of college than it does today. For example, about 40 years ago—soon after the Pell Grant Program was established—the average award covered about 50 percent of the average cost of in-state tuition, fees, room, and board at public 2-year colleges, and 39 percent at public 4-year colleges. Today, the average Pell Grant award amount covers just 37 percent of these costs at public 2-year colleges, and 19 percent at public 4-year colleges. Federal Work-Study Program employment opportunities may be available to qualifying students, but several officials we interviewed noted that funding for this program is extremely limited, especially at community colleges where there are more students at risk of food insecurity.
The report was produced in response to a request by four Democratic senators. While its findings are devastating, its recommendations to the Department of Agriculture, which runs the food stamp program, and the Department of Education are modest, at best. The GAO calls for making information about the SNAP program “easier to understand and more accessible” and for greater coordination among regional offices and state agencies. Those would surely be positive steps, but hardly adequate to address the problems outlined in the report. And it’s difficult to imagine that Betsy DeVos’s department, seemingly focused on assisting for-profits, weakening accreditation standards, and hindering the fight against sexual harassment, will be doing much. Indeed, nothing less than an overhaul of the federal government’s approach to financial aid seems called for. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), one of the four senators who requested the report, said, “there’s a lot of work to do to ensure students are getting enough to eat. As we work to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, I look forward to building on the recommendations of this report to make college truly affordable by addressing the total costs of college.”
The report focuses on low-income students, the 39 percent of students whose income was below 130 percent of the federal poverty line, concluding that the problem is a product of the fact that “a college education is accessible to more low-income Americans than ever before.” But Goldrick-Rab told The Atlantic that “Middle-class students, those who are ‘too rich for Pell and too poor to afford college,’ struggle as well. And they may not be as likely to use things such as the food pantry.” The report shows “that food insecurity is a college-completion issue,” Goldrick-Rab says. “We’re undermining our federal investment in financial aid by not paying attention to this. We have to stop pretending like living expenses are not educational expenses.”
That’s true enough, but it also demonstrates further that the entire American Funding Model, to use Christopher Newfield’s term, which has increasingly privatized the financing of higher education, is morally, if not financially, bankrupt. As Newfield explained in his indispensable book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, “Financial aid today reflects the privatization effect . . . in which universities replace declining public resources with private funds.” That system “is structured to translate either flat tuition or higher tuition into higher debt.”
And into ever more hungry, and often even homeless, students.
