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I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
What keeps colleges from doing more with emergency aid? Money, attitudes, and more.
Why don’t colleges just tap into their own housing programs and meal plans to help students in need?
That was the essence of a comment I got from a reader, Mark Mazzone, responding to my newsletter last week. It was about a start-up company’s plans to help colleges optimize their emergency-aid services, and its naming of Sara Goldrick-Rab as its chief strategy officer for emergency aid.
“Colleges can become the philanthropic entity which they seek to establish ties with,” wrote Mazzone, a counselor at Erie Community College, which is part of the State University of New York.
Turns out, that’s easier said than done.
I know that now because after getting that note from Mazzone, I checked in with Goldrick-Rab (who, by the way, isn’t leaving her professorship at Temple University; her new post at the start-up, Edquity, is a consulting gig). She pointed me to a nonprofit organization called Swipe Out Hunger. It promotes some of the same practices that Mazzone suggested to me, such as letting students donate their unused meal-plan breakfasts, lunches, and dinners to their peers.
Offering up unused meal-card swipes sounds like a simple, even obvious, solution (much like the practice I hear about from friends in the federal government, where co-workers can offer their unused sick days to colleagues in need). But as the founder of Swipe Out Hunger, Rachel Sumekh, told me, it takes some work.
“It’s about changing the campus culture,” she says. Sumekh still remembers the dean at a college she wouldn’t name telling her that “anorexia is a bigger problem” for students than hunger.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that campus leaders — and the folks like dining-hall directors and deans of student life who are instrumental to implementing systems to help students facing hunger — are starting to get it. “Now the higher-ed sector knows it is a priority,” Sumekh told me. “The silos are falling.”
Swipe Out Hunger started as a student organization in 2010 at the University of California at Los Angeles. That’s when, Sumekh says, “me and my friends had extra meals on our meal plans” and didn’t want them to go to waste. The group is now active on 80-plus campuses, up from 44 the year before. It won’t work with a campus unless there’s a committed team of students on board. It also asks that colleges promise to involve their dining director, a dean, or another top administrator with expertise in meeting students’ basic needs.
The organization’s growth is notable, and Swipe Out Hunger has also been successful in prodding colleges to train personnel who can help students sign up for SNAP benefits and other food aid. Perhaps as important as the aid itself, Sumekh says that polls of students on campuses where it operates found “this program helped them feel included.”
Still, I suspect there are hundreds more colleges where a program like this could be of help to students in need.
So what’s the problem? “Prioritization is always a barrier,” Sumekh told me. Likewise, among the general population, the “narrative of who’s on campus today” hasn’t necessarily caught up with the reality that many students today need food assistance.
But of course the real barrier is the usual one: money. “No one knows how to pay for this,” Sumekh says.
I get that. I’m sure that when food-service companies (or colleges themselves) develop their dining-systems budgets, they assume that some students won’t be using all the meals they’re entitled to. That’s part of the profit margin. Change those assumptions, and the margins shrink. No wonder there’s resistance.
If the “swipe” movement catches on, it would require a change in thinking about the assumptions underlying food-service budgets, and, in Sumekh’s words, “university leaders who are brave enough and bold enough” to demand the swipe flexibility from their dining services or contractors.
Some of those conversations may already be underway, and with the National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual meeting just around the corner, maybe there’s a chance for a few more of them in Austin, Tex., later this month. One model worth exploring: the ONE cafe that opened this spring at the University of Kentucky following a student protest, where students can buy full lunches for $1. The project is subsidized by the university and Aramark.
Sumekh raised another point that got me thinking that we need far more transparency about how colleges use their dining systems. She argues that universities are being forced “to use food as a revenue source,” instead of thinking of it as a basic need, because of declining state support.
I don’t know if that’s the case. One college-cost expert I consulted, David Feldman, noted that in Virginia, state rules prevent public colleges from using dining services as a profit center. But that may not be true for other states. And no doubt at many private colleges the profits from the dining services help to underwrite other operations. As Feldman noted, such cross-subsidies from food or housing aren’t necessarily bad. They could, in fact, be used to hire more professors or constrain tuition increases.
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Still, as students’ food insecurity challenges become increasingly high-profile, the absence of reliable public data about the revenue models underlying these sorts of auxiliary-services seems all the more problematic.
Quote of the Week.
“Please understand this: Betsy DeVos does for-profit schools no favors by rolling back Gainful Employment. Like other initiatives by the administration it’s a move that is remarkably obtuse and short-sighted. Its purpose is to foil Obama, NOT aid the sector.”
— Trace Urdan, a managing director at Tyton Partners
From a Twitter thread in which Urdan argued that the U.S. Education Department’s decision last week to repeal the long-contested “gainful employment” rule would hurt the that sector, not help it. While the trade association for career colleges applauded the department’s action, advocates for the rule and the American Council on Education decried it.
The Edge is moving … to Wednesdays.
Beginning next week, we’ll be sending this newsletter to you on Wednesday mornings rather than on Tuesday. It’s still weekly. It’s still coming from me (most of the time). And it’s still free. Just coming on a different day; I know you all can handle it.
Wishing you all a happy Fourth of July. Look for “me” in your inbox on July 10.
Got a tip you’d like to share, or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here.
