While Congress Squabbles, Some States Take Their Own Steps to Help Hungry Students

Noah Berger for The Chronicle

It’s difficult for college students to qualify for federal food-assistance benefits under current law, and the Farm Bill that was voted down by the U.S. House of Representatives this month would have made it even harder — for them and many others.

That defeat was a relief for student advocates, even though few expected that the bill, in that form, would ever be enacted because of opposition in the U.S. Senate. That the legislation got as far as it did, however, also sent them a clear sign: Proposals to alter the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to help students deal with hunger and food insecurity aren’t going anywhere in the Republican-controlled House.

But that hasn’t kept advocates from continuing to press for changes. The nonpartisan Center for Law and Social Policy, known as Clasp, for example, has urged Congress to lower or eliminate the current law’s 20-hour minimum work requirement, while a millennial-focused group, Young Invincibles, has argued for providing SNAP benefits to students who qualify for Pell Grants.

Meanwhile, in some states, officials are interpreting the existing federal rules to help make more needy students eligible for SNAP benefits, even as some worry that, in the current political climate, drawing attention to those efforts will invite a clampdown.

Some 42 million people now receive SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps. Each recipient gets about $125 a month, on average. The money — about $4.10 a day — isn’t big, notes Kathleen B. O’Neil, director of a benefits-assistance program at Bunker Hill Community College, “but it helps.”

Still, says O’Neil, whose office also oversees a campus food bank, many students who could be eligible are reluctant to sign up. Some have told her that they weren’t brought up that way or that other people needed it more.

“I constantly say, ‘You’re the person people want on food stamps because you’ll be paying society back’” after completing college, says O’Neil. And she tells them: “You don’t have to sign up for life.”

There is apparently no reliable national figure on the number of college students receiving SNAP benefits because no agency collects the information in that way. (Young Invincibles produced a report this year, based on U.S. Census data, that estimated that only 18 percent of college students would be eligible and only 3 percent receive SNAP, but it noted that its counts could be far off because it lacked the information to factor in how SNAP benefits are actually determined.) A recent national survey by the Wisconsin Hope Lab found that about 40 percent of students reported food insecurity in the previous 30 days.

Last week Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, both Democrats, announced that the Government Accountability Office had agreed to their request for a national study of food insecurity among college students.

Many Exceptions

SNAP benefits have been tough for students to obtain since the late 1970s, when Congress restricted their access to the program. Except it didn’t fully restrict access. While the law says students who attend more than half time are ineligible, it also includes more than a dozen exceptions.

Those exceptions make it possible for students to receive SNAP as long as they don’t also exceed a maximum income cutoff. Other exceptions cover students working at least 20 hours a week, students under 18 or 50 and older, students caring for a child under 6, and single-parent students who are enrolled full time and care for a child under 12. (This paper provides a clear breakdown of the exceptions.)

The just-rejected Farm Bill would have eliminated one of those exceptions — for a parent unable to obtain child care for a 6-to-11-year-old while going to school and work. The bill would have also imposed sweeping new work mandates and cut off the flexibility that states now have to adjust the income maximums used to determine eligibility.

Democrats in the House, who are in the minority, opposed many of those measures, but the bill was ultimately voted down because it also lost support from a group of Republicans who voted no to protest House inaction on immigration legislation they want to enact.

The current exceptions mean that, in many cases, students can qualify for SNAP benefits, but policy analysts and college officials say the rules are confusing, especially for students whose child-care or work circumstances shift from week to week, and verification is often confusing and time-consuming.

That’s one reason Clasp has proposed simplifying the verification process. And it’s why Young Invincibles, among other groups, argues that students would be better served if the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service simply altered how it describes student eligibility for SNAP. Instead of starting out by declaring most students ineligible, the groups say, the program should declare that students may be eligible if they meet the criteria of the exceptions.

Among other reforms, Clasp has also called for changing how private-loan proceeds are treated; currently, if students use such money for living expenses while going to college, it counts as income and can make them ineligible.

A Decade-Old Complaint

The current Congress is unlikely to pass any of those proposals. But that hasn’t kept some states from taking action.

California, for example, has seized on two of the other exceptions to help make more students SNAP-eligible — one that applies to students with work-study jobs and another that covers students who receive federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the benefits program formerly known as welfare and now commonly called TANF.

The law says students who are eligible for work-study under their financial-aid package and who anticipate taking such a job are SNAP-eligible, but since February 2017, California deems them eligible even if they haven’t gotten the job.

“The funding for work-study is half of what it needs to be,” and as many as 500,000 eligible community-college students never get their jobs, says Jessica Bartholow, a policy advocate at the Western Center on Law and Poverty, a California legal-services agency. The center spent two years working with state officials to make the change.

The interpretation makes sense, she says. After all, if you’re a student and you didn’t get your work-study placement, “you’re probably hungrier because you don’t have a job.”

The center has also turned a decade-old complaint — that California was using federal money it receives under TANF to fund its Cal Grant student-aid program — into a SNAP reform. The group convinced state lawmakers that because some students were receiving Cal Grants financed by TANF dollars, that meant they could also be eligible for SNAP benefits under the TANF exception.

The California Student Aid Commission is now sending letters and emails to those Cal Grant recipients, so they can use the notices as verification that they may qualify for CalFresh, as the SNAP program is known there.

In a similar vein, since 2010, Massachusetts has relied on an exception in the law that says students could be SNAP-eligible if they enroll in a career and technical program as defined by the federal Perkins Act. Many career-focused programs at community colleges, including those in nursing and criminal justice, are funded with Perkins Act dollars.

As a result, the colleges now designate certain majors as SNAP-eligible, a move that makes it easier to qualify students. Many more students at Bunker Hill Community College have been able to use the SNAP benefits, but “it’s not an explosion,” says Patricia Baker, a senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute who helped develop the policy.

Bartholow, in California, says she knows of some advocates who worry about drawing attention to such changes, although that’s probably less of a danger in California than in other parts of the country. “There’s good cause to be nervous about talking about anything that helps poor people,” she says, but “all we’re doing in California is making sure the state is implementing the rules.”

As a formerly low-income student herself, she says she’s proud to help with the changes. “You’re doing everything America has asked you to do” if you’ve made it to college as a needy student, she says. Getting SNAP benefits is just a way to help you not be hungry while you’re there, she says. “It’s congruent with progressive and conservative values.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.