How Many College Students are Going Hungry?/ Education
“The more researchers study “food insecurity” on campuses, the more serious the problem appears to be.
Toni Airaksinen knows that hunger can hide beneath a veneer of achievement. She worked her way to Barnard College while growing up on food stamps.
So when she arrived at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, Ms. Airaksinen suspected that some students would be waging similar battles in the shadows of the elite university’s Manhattan campus.
“Whether you’re at Columbia or you’re at a community college, there will always be people struggling to make ends meet,” says Ms. Airaksinen. And when money gets tight, food is often the first expense to go.
The sophomore was nevertheless struck by stories her classmates told: passing out in academic buildings after skipping meals; eating cereal three times a day; planning their schedules around when a local grocery store sets out free cheese samples.
“They would say things like, Oh, I’m going to the Republicans’ club meeting,” says Ms. Airaksinen. “I would say, Wow, I didn’t know you were a Republican. And they’d say, I’m not, they have free food there.”
“The cliché of the thrifty student who subsists on ramen noodles has given way to a more troubling portrait: the hungry student who needs help and may not know how to ask for it.”
Colleges, including wealthy ones like Columbia, have only recently begun to understand how many students on their campuses have trouble paying for food. As college costs rise, institutional belts tighten, and more low-income and first-generation students enroll, the cliché of the thrifty student who subsists on ramen noodles has given way to a more troubling portrait: the hungry student who needs help and may not know how to ask for it.
The earliest available study of “food insecurity” among college students was published eight years ago at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Researchers found that 21 percent of students there struggled with food insecurity, a term that refers to people who skip meals or don’t get proper nutrition because they can’t afford it. A new study, focusing on first-year students at Arizona State University, put the rate around 34 percent.
Studies on other campuses have yielded a range of figures, from 14 percent at the University of Alabama to 59 percent at Western Oregon University.
Meg Bruening, an assistant professor of nutrition at Arizona State, attributes the variation to differences in the sample populations. “I don’t think we really have a good understanding of how big the problem is,” she says. In nearly every case, however, the rate of food insecurity among students was much higher than the rates for the general population.
‘There Is Stigma, There Is Shame’
Hunger often coincides with other problems that tend to get more attention. In her study of first-year students, Ms. Bruening found that those who couldn’t rely on regular meals also were more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Other studies have tied food insecurity to low-income households and unstable housing situations.
Like homelessness or mental-health issues, food insecurity is not always easy to notice from the outside. When researchers at the City University of New York surveyed more than a thousand undergraduates on 17 of its campuses in 2010, 19 percent said they knew somebody at the university who had food or hunger problems. In fact, nearly 40 percent of students were food-insecure at some level.
One reason is that students tend not to talk about it. “At the end of the day there is stigma, there is shame, even in the low-income, first-generation community,” says Ms. Airaksinen. Asking for help can be embarrassing.
Debbie Diehm, an assistant to the vice president for student affairs at Western Oregon, remembers years ago when a worried faculty member sent her a student who evidently had been missing meals. Ms. Diehm offered to help the student apply for a grant from the university’s student emergency fund. But the application form, which required only a name and a short explanation for the request, struck him as daunting.
“He said, ‘I just can’t do that,'” recalls Ms. Diehm. “Filling out a one-page application for foundation dollars was too much for that person to do, no matter what encouragement I gave.”
Western Oregon’s student-affairs office has since started giving out gift cards for local grocery stores, worth up to $100, to students who seek help buying food. At CUNY, where only 6 percent of undergraduates reported using food stamps despite the high rate of food insecurity, officials on several campuses have offered to help students navigate the sometimes complicated process of figuring out if they are eligible for public assistance.
Student-Led Interventions
Many interventions have been led by students. At Western Oregon and elsewhere, students run campus food pantries, stocked with donated groceries and unused food from the dining halls, where their classmates can shop free. Campus food banks are proliferating; the College and University Food Bank Alliance now counts more than 200 members. Often the banks are started by students, although college officials have become increasingly interested in running them, according to Clare Cady, director of the alliance.
At Columbia students are using technology to fight the problem. Last spring undergraduates in a campus group dedicated to the needs of first-generation and low-income students created a Facebook page called “CU Meal Share,” where Columbia students could volunteer to swipe their classmates into dining halls. (“I can swipe people into Ferris tonight at 6:30!” wrote one student in late October, referring to a campus eatery.) This fall a pair of undergraduates unveiled a mobile app that matches hungry students with nearby meal donors.
The college, in a bid to encourage this kind of student-to-student charity while also ensuring privacy, has created a kind of virtual food bank, the “emergency meal fund,” stocked with donated meal points. Rather than asking a classmate for a swipe, students now can request six free meals per semester from the fund through a dining-hall official, no questions asked.
Occasional free meals can help, says Ms. Airaksinen, but ultimately she sees the emergency meal fund as a “bandage solution.” Officials have been receptive to students’ concerns about food insecurity, but the Barnard sophomore has found it disheartening to watch her classmates struggle to fulfill such a basic need.
“It is really frustrating to know that the university has so many assets, so much capital, but to realize that they’re spending their money on things like lawn care,” says Ms. Airaksinen. “There’s just so many different ways where money that could be directed toward this issue is spent on other things.”
Columbia officials pointed to the university’s generous financial aid, as well as its many outreach and assistance programs for low-income and first-generation students — including tutoring, stipends for unpaid internships, and a closet in the career center where students can borrow nice clothes for job interviews.
Beyond administering the emergency meal fund, officials have recently tried spreading the word about an existing pool of money called the “deans’ assistance fund.” Low-income students can apply to that fund for help in covering unexpected expenses such as medical bills, winter coats, and meals during semester breaks, when the dining halls are closed.
One Problem Among Many
Colleges have been eager to lend a hand to hungry students, but some have wrestled with the question of how to make the problem of food insecurity a priority.
“It’s a hard thing for a university to acknowledge,” says Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor of public health at Hunter College who has led CUNY’s research on food insecurity. “On the one hand, the evidence is pretty good that hungry students learn less well.”
On the other, institutions might not have the resources, or the mission, to feed students in addition to teaching them, says Mr. Freudenberg. “It means taking on one more task,” he says. “So I think there’s been some ambivalence about our findings and what to do about it.”
Officials at CUNY are doing a follow-up study to find out how things have changed since 2010. Mr. Freudenberg worries that the university’s push to educate students about their eligibility for food stamps, which has taken aim at six community colleges and one four-year institution in the CUNY system, is not reaching enough students.
The consultations may be helping thousands of people on a handful of campuses claim a spot on the public dole, he says, and the pantries might help them get by in a pinch, but those measures probably haven’t made much of a dent in the larger problem.
“We know it’s still a problem,” says the professor. “It hasn’t gone away.”
