As college tuition and fees continue to rise, some students are struggling to balance their education expenses with their basic needs.
Thousands of University of California, Berkeley students currently depend on the school’s Food Pantry for assistance, and more than 500 of the university’s students have applied for food stamps since January, compared to 111 in 2016 and 41 in 2015. The University of California system found that 19 percent of their students had too little to eat “due to limited resources” and that 23 percent routinely ate substandard food.
Food insecurity has become such a common issue in recent years that four campus-based organizations – the College and University Food Bank Alliance, the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, the Student Government Resource Center, and the Student Public Interest Research Groups – decided to conduct a survey on the issue during the spring of 2016. The survey found that 22 percent of students reported being hungry in the previous 30 days.
Unsurprisingly, the survey also found that 64 percent of these food insecure students faced some form of housing insecurity and 15 percent reported experiencing some form of homelessness in the past 12 months.
Faced with this reality, these students are forced to pick up extra shifts, even if it means missing class, and some are dropping out.
College expenses have risen exponentially – so much so that Pell Grants, which used to cover around 75 percent of the cost of attendance at a public four-year college for lower-income students, now cover only about 30 percent of expenses.
Some universities, like those under the University of California umbrella, have committed to expanding food pantries to serve their starving students. This gesture fails to address the underlying problem: College has become way too expensive.
Students from low and moderate income households have always been at a financial disadvantage, but they haven’t always struggled so much to put food on the table. Many colleges and universities will argue that more government funding will solve this issue, but it never does. Moreover, this model is unsustainable. Even liberal states like California have scaled back their funding of public universities.
If colleges and universities are as committed to accepting more students from low-to-moderate-income households as they claim, they need to tighten their belts, slash wasteful programs that are not integral to their mission, and quit revamping campus buildings so that they can reduce tuition for their students.
Until they do, this problem of student hunger will only continue to snowball.
Brendan Pringle (@BrendanPringle) is a freelance journalist in California. He is a National Journalism Center graduate and formerly served as a development officer for Young America’s Foundation at the Reagan Ranch.
