Of Ramen and Couches: College in the Age of Insecurity

This guest blog in honor of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week is by Dani Lopez, Student Engagement Coordinator for the forthcoming HOPE Center for College, Community, and Justice. Find her on twitter @DaniLopezNYC .

In my Bronx high school everyone told me that college would be it.

College was the goal we were all working towards and, for the majority of my school, one that was well within reach and expected. It would be the place where we would finally be treated as adults free to make our own decisions about our education and our lives.

For those of us from marginalized communities in particular, college would also be the place where we would be able to make the biggest leap towards fulfilling the promise of the “American Dream” and escaping the poverty we grew up with.

As a teenager though, what really sold me on college was the idea of independence. But once I got to college, I learned what that ‘independence’ really meant.

No More Free Lunch

From the ages of 4 through 18 most of the meals I’d eaten in my life came from the federally funded National School Lunch Program and local programs. Together those programs provided me and my younger brother with consistent and relatively healthy food options year-round.

That all went *poof* when I started college.

I was fortunate enough to have most of my tuition covered by federal and state grants, but as I soon realized, college costs go beyond tuition. Books and transportation took a huge chunk of the little savings our family had, and that wasn’t even taking food into account .

Soon I was balancing working while going to school full-time. I was skipping breakfast and mostly living on dollar slices of pizza and ramen, with the occasional bagel and cream cheese making an appearance. My friends dealt with similar issues but we thought we were outliers. We were wrong.

Food Insecurity by the Numbers

Like most people I assumed that because I wasn’t starving things were fine. But food insecurity isn’t just about having food, it’s about having nutritionally meaningful food.

Having access to healthy food is key to academic success — that is the premise of the National School Lunch Program. Just try paying attention to a lecture when your head hurts because you’ve been living on the yellow bricks of noodles and salt or when your stomach has been empty for who knows how long. Odds are it will not go well.

According to a 2011 study of the CUNY system, almost 40% of students experienced some form of food insecurity in the past year. The recent Wisconsin HOPE Lab report Hungry and Homeless in College looked at community colleges across the country and found that more than half of those students are food-insecure.

Students at elite institutions aren’t exempt from food insecurity . At Columbia University students have even created an app to share cafeteria swipes with those in need throughout the semester. Other schools like The George Washington University, University of Michigan, Reed College, and even Ivies Brown and Cornell are members of the College and University Food Bank Alliance (CUFBA) which supports and help create food pantries on campuses.

Clearly food insecurity is not a niche issue. There is something wrong with the way we’re doing college if this many people in this many places are struggling to meet their basic human needs.

Of course, food access is only one aspect of our basic needs. Compounding the problem of food insecurity another big issue: housing insecurity.

A Place to Rest One’s Head

Along with food, having stable housing is among the most basic necessities for all human beings, not just college students. However, in a time of rents that make eyes water in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Boston — that continue to increase year after year — students are increasingly left behind.

When calculating cost of attendance, not all colleges use the most up-to-date rental numbers and in many cases underestimate the cost of living off-campus. Yet for college students that live in campus dorms, paying for the privilege is, paradoxically, often more expensive than living off-campus.

Even when living on campus housing insecurity remains an issue for many students, especially come break.

Schools closing for winter or summer break may not appear to be an issue since most people go back home. But for low-income, international, non-traditional, and homeless students (categories which can often overlap) that can’t afford to leave campus or simply have no other place to go, options are limited.

But, as students who have managed to stay on campus during break know, having a place to stay is only the first part of the problem. When campus is closed for break that can mean students have to work with reduced cafeteria hours or none at all.

When I was unable to go home and had to spend my Christmas in the frozen tundra that is Amherst in the winter, I was lucky enough to have access to a makeshift food pantry the college voluntarily set up for students in similar situations.

In my case, other food options were either way beyond my price range or inaccessible because public transportation in the college town also shut down over break. Had Amherst not provided all the ramen, granola, and other goodies I honestly don’t know what I would’ve done. That being said, by the end of day three I would’ve killed for a cherry tomato.

Trying to Make a Dollar out of Fifteen Cents

Off-campus living can be more affordable than dorm life, which is why so many people go for it when given the chance. The problem is that despite commuting to school, students still have trouble making ends meet — if they even could in the first place.

Paying rent is more challenging as a student since you can’t work as much as you might need to because you have to go to class and study. This is where you have to think about making trade-offs.

While the dream would be to have an apartment to oneself, it’s not uncommon to have to share a one-bedroom between two or even three people. Even that might not be enough savings though. Living further away from school does wonders for bringing down rent costs, but what you save in money you lose in time. Is it worth saving a few hundred dollars a month when it means losing sleep as well as potential work and study hours from commuting a larger distance?

But what if you can’t afford your own room? Students with cars are increasingly turning to them not just as transportation, but as shelter. Students with no other options will also couch surf and cycle through places, never having a stable home while in school and constantly worrying about when they will have to move on to the next place.

Students have been forced to be ingenious in finding ways to save money while going to school. I remember hearing the legend of a science student at one of the Five Colleges who worked at the library a few years prior and would sleep there, shower at the dorms of friends, and keep his belongings in his car in order to afford to stay in school. Similar stories have been reported at NYU and the University of Tampa.

None of this is normal.

That we as students have to put up with all this just to get an education — an education which is not free — boggles the mind.

The stories of students sleeping on friend’s couches or outright living in a shelter are more common than we know. Estimates by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab put the number of homeless college students at close to 14% but since stressed students are less likely to participate in those survey studies, the true numbers are likely higher.

No More Struggle

As students we understand that college is supposed to be challenging, but food and housing insecurity are not part of the deal. When rates of homelessness among college students are in the double-digits and food insecurity affects more than half of all students, someone is clearly not doing enough.

As college students we tolerate a lot. We pull all-nighters on the regular, take out on average tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and increasingly pick up side jobs to make it through the semester. The fact is students can only be as successful as the resources we give them. The more supports they have, the more likely students are to graduate on time and be able to reap the benefits of their education.

As enormous as the problems of food and housing insecurity are, there are things that can be done by legislators and college administrators to address these issues.

On the federal level, expanding the National School Lunch Program to cover college students would be a huge step towards fighting food insecurity, as would changing the onerous work requirements for students to be eligible for SNAP.

Schools can help by providing emergency grants for students to use for what they need in the moment, be it groceries or paying rent. Students can help by pushing for support to create campus food pantries and programs to share swipes is also an effective way of addressing food insecurity.

More importantly, we need students to be able to share their stories and place their voices at the center of discussions on basic needs security. Data alone is not enough. We must listen to and acknowledge the experiences of students and allow them to claim the power of their narratives. Only then can we know how to make a meaningful push for the changes that need to happen.