When the new coronavirus forced campus closures and upended higher education, colleges scrambled to stitch together emergency support for their most vulnerable students. Fearing it wouldn’t be enough, many low-income students armed with Cash App, Venmo, and PayPal accounts turned to the internet with pleas for help.
But what about the students who aren’t so internet savvy or comfortable asking strangers for money? Jessi Russell, a senior at Wesleyan University, wondered. The ones university support wasn’t reaching or who might otherwise be falling through the cracks?
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
So in mid-March she started a crowdfunding effort for low-income students, and it snowballed beyond her expectations. The fund, which has so far raised more than $265,000, started cutting checks and making direct deposits late last month. Nearly 300 students are seeking help from the fund, meant to be an alternative support system without what Russell describes as the bureaucracy of the official university emergency fund.
At many institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students and alumni created “mutual aid” spreadsheets in which classmates describe their needs and others can try to meet them. Storage space. A room to live in. A laptop for online classes.
But in Russell’s fund, the help comes in the form of cold, hard cash, free from red tape or verification of need. The spreadsheet she set up instructs students to assess their need on a scale of 1 to 5, without asking them to explain or prove it with receipts. The concept requires some faith in human nature.
“If universities don’t choose to break some rules” to support their vulnerable students, said Russell, herself from a low-income background, “a lot of at-risk students are going to suffer. And I don’t know if they’re going to be able to feel any kind of connection to a place like this.”
Assessing Need
But where Russell sees an unwieldy bureaucracy in Wesleyan’s official emergency fund, Michael S. Roth, the university’s president, sees good governance and an efficient use of resources.
“I’ve been a president for 20 years now — at two different places — and I’ve found that people perceive their own needs differently,” said Roth, who has also served as president of the California College of the Arts. “What one perceives as a need might not be perceived by another as a need. So I think having criteria for a framework for making decisions is important.”
Applying for aid from the university’s official fund, which as of last month had collected more than $100,000, isn’t onerous, Roth said. “You fill out a pretty straightforward application.” The vice president for student life oversees the fund and consults with each of the class deans, who work closely with students.
The university is supporting students in other ways as well, Roth said. Wesleyan opted to offer prorated housing refunds for students leaving campus, and carved out exceptions to remain on campus for students with no place to go. The university is also still paying its students on Federal Work-Study who had not exceeded their allotments under the program.
Higher education in general has indicated that it was never meant to include low-income students.
Roth voiced concerns about the student-led crowdfunding effort. “I understand the antibureaucratic spirit of crowdsourcing, but just giving money away to people you know who say they need it can lead to unintended consequences,” he said. “We should make sure that there’s demonstrated need, so as to be equitable in how we distribute funds.”
Indeed, at the heart of the tension between the dueling emergency funds is how universities gauge need. To Roth, for example, the university’s money shouldn’t be used to support students’ family members. That, he says, reduces the number of students it can support.
But university financial-aid models and, in this case, the official emergency fund, don’t take into account low-income students’ actual needs, said Russell. With Covid-19, disaster has struck, and colleges need to make students whole, she said.
“Higher education in general has indicated that it was never meant to include low-income students,” Russell said, “and we hope that if universities accept these students in the future, they make radical changes to how they embrace them rather than just absorb them.”
A Growing Campaign
To see how both funds are useful to struggling students, consider the case of Gato Nsengamungu Eugene, a student from Rwanda who is the first in his family to go to college.
Without the ability to work on campus to send money home to his struggling family, he opted to make the risky decision to fly home when Wesleyan closed its campus. He figured the housing refund students who left campus would receive would help support his family.
The university, he said, was generous. He applied through the official emergency fund, and received $1,250 for his plane ticket back home. But then he had to set up his own place and pay for internet, utilities, and food. That’s where the crowdsourced fund helped. From it he received $1,000, which he used to pay his rent through August, when he hopes to be back on campus.
For Russell, the hard part of her project has just started. The fund received more money than she had envisioned, and it has overwhelmed her. Turns out, banks get suspicious when many transactions are made from a nonestablished account. To get around daily spending limits, Russell said she created several bank accounts to hold and distribute money raised through the fund.
She also started an advisory board of mostly students to oversee the effort. Though the board includes the director of the campus’s resource center as an informal adviser, Russell said, it remains independent and separate from the university.
And so, a fund created to nimbly support low-income students has grown unwieldy. Russell is now creating the infrastructure for a fund-raising campaign, navigating complex banking and financial regulations, and coordinating an advisory board that has teams for issues like outreach and data collection. It’s starting to sound kind of like … a bureaucracy.
Russell sees the point, but rejects it.
“I feel humbled by the fact that I needed more people than just myself,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the equivalent of becoming bureaucratic.” In fact, she said, the experience has made her feel “completely validated” in her disgust with bureaucracy. “There are so many restrictions and regulations that I believe are unnecessary and just inhibit efforts to actually help people.”
