Safety Net

It used to be that the phrase “starving students” brought to mind undergraduates subsisting on ramen noodles and saving their pennies for beer. No longer.

Recent statistics showing that high percentages of students are struggling to meet basic needs have shocked the consciences of campus administrators and given new meaning to the old cliché.

A lack of reliable data on hunger and homelessness at the campus level has made it difficult for many administrators to calibrate their response. Some institutions have responded aggressively, with meal-donation programs, food banks, emergency aid, and efforts to help students apply for public benefits like food stamps and cash assistance. But plenty of colleges have done nothing, assuming that the two problems don’t touch their campuses. Chances are, they’re wrong.

In a 12-state survey of 3,800 mostly undergraduate students released last fall, more than one in five students at eight community colleges and 26 four-year institutions said they had gone hungry in the past month. And close to one in 10 said they had been homeless at some point in the past year. Nearly half described themselves as housing- or food-insecure, meaning that they could not regularly afford to pay rent or buy groceries.

More than half of the hungry students received Pell Grants, and 56 percent were employed — statistics that reveal gaps in the existing safety net and belie the notion that these students would be OK if they just got a job.

“When we have so many students who are doing everything right but still can’t afford food, it means we’re failing to provide these students with a viable path to success in their higher education,” said James Dubick, an organizer with the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, one of the four groups that prepared the report.

Increases in the number of homeless and hungry students result from several factors, including changing demographics and rising tuition. As college costs climb, state support for public higher education shrinks, and more low-income and first-generation students enroll, a growing number of students are being forced to choose between tuition and food and shelter.

Yet for all the greater awareness of hunger and homelessness on campus, we still know little about the scope of the problems. Surveys by colleges, higher-education systems, and advocacy groups have found rates of food insecurity at 14 to 60 percent. Statistics on student homelessness are even scarcer. The only “official” numbers come from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which asks applicants if they have been homeless — or at risk of becoming homeless — in the past year or so. Last year 150,000 filers answered yes to that question, according to Department of Education data obtained by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington.

The Department of Education doesn’t routinely share its financial-aid statistics with colleges, and only a few institutions and systems — many in California — have surveyed their students on food and housing insecurity. On many campuses, homeless and hungry students remain invisible.

The Kresge Foundation is financing a survey by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, due out this spring, which will provide the broadest look to date at student hunger and homelessness. Rebecca C. Villarreal, a program officer at Kresge, says she hopes the results of the survey, which reached nearly 40,000 students at 70 colleges, will compel more administrators to act.

“One of the biggest challenges in providing support is that we don’t know who these students are,” she says.

But even colleges that have solid statistics aren’t always willing to share that data, as Yvonne Montoya, a formerly homeless student who attends Santa Monica College, discovered when she asked for it. “Santa Monica is an affluent community,” says Ms. Montoya, who led a successful campaign to force food vendors on some California college campuses to accept food stamps. “They were embarrassed and did not want to address this.”

Pam Y. Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill Community College, a Boston campus that offers a food pantry, emergency assistance-fund, and other aid programs, says it will take more than numbers to persuade some colleges to add services. Though there’s less stigma than there used to be, there’s still a perception, she says, that “if you’re intelligent enough to have gotten into college, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

Still, a growing number of colleges are beginning to confront hunger and homelessness among their students. Four years ago, only 15 colleges belonged to the College and University Food Bank Alliance. Today the alliance has more than 400 members.

Other colleges have experimented with programs, such as Swipe Out Hunger, that allow students to donate their unused meal-card swipes. That organization, which was started by students at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2009, now has chapters on 23 campuses.

Emergency aid programs, which provide grants and short-term loans to students to help cover unexpected expenses like medical bills, have also proliferated, with nearly three-quarters of colleges reporting in a recent survey that they offered some form of the aid.

Less common are programs that help students navigate the complicated process of applying for cash assistance and other public benefits. Nonprofit organizations like Single Stop, the Benefit Bank, and Seedco have set up shop on a few dozen campuses, offering benefits assistance and other financial support. But only a handful of colleges have created programs of their own.

Early evidence suggests that such efforts can improve students’ chances of academic success. This past fall, the RAND Corporation released a study that found that students participating at Single Stop at 11 community colleges stayed in college longer than their peers did, and earned more credits.

And last year, the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation reported that 73 percent of Wisconsin community-college students who received emergency grants through its three-year pilot program either stayed in college or graduated.

To help homeless students make it through breaks, some colleges have started keeping certain dorms open when the college is closed, or finding faculty volunteers willing to house the students, or making arrangements with local shelters. New York University is starting a year-round program next fall that will pair students with elderly local residents with spare bedrooms, saving students thousands of dollars in rent.

For many colleges, the biggest challenge in helping homeless and hungry students is finding the money to pay for services and persuading embarrassed students to use them. To ease the stigma, some colleges let students use their food banks anonymously. Others, like Skyline College, in California, arrange for students who are receiving public benefits to screen and assist their peers. Humboldt State University ran an “Out With Stigma” campaign that featured students who identified themselves as food-stamp recipients in social-media campaigns.

Meanwhile, advocates for homeless and hungry students have been trying to persuade Congress to expand the national school-lunch program to the nation’s colleges, arguing that hunger inhibits learning. But they’re not optimistic that it will happen under a Trump administration, so they plan to try to get state support for that idea.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and a chief proponent of the plan, says the social safety net has always been weaker at the college level than in schools.

“People view higher education as a privilege, not a right,” she says, “and they view adults as personally responsible for their own poverty.”

Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.