While the old cliché of the “starving student” has often been used to indicate tough times in college, “food insecure” is the more accurate term describing the situation addressed in a population study by the HSU Department of Social Work. The research, which included face-to-face interviews with students, uncovered some disturbing trends.
Forty percent of the students were cutting the size of meals or skipping them entirely because they didn’t have enough money for food. Most of the same students reported skipping meals between 5-20 days a month. Some of their comments reflected the seriousness of the situation.
“I get major headaches when I don’t eat. It makes it very hard to concentrate on schoolwork,” said one of the students surveyed. “It’s hard to do homework when, after a long day I get home and have no energy. I just wait to go to bed because there is not enough food and not enough money to buy food,” said another.
Social work graduate student Heather King knows those problems all too well. She arrived in Humboldt County in 2007, “pregnant and in poverty,” she says. Baby on hip, she completed her undergraduate requirements in 2008, but her difficulties continued.
“I struggled with poverty and raising a child for the next several years,” King said. “This struggle led me to pursue my degree in social work. I knew I was a good scholar. The question was: How could I use it to improve the circumstances of so many millions experiencing what I was?”
After entering the MSW program in 2013, King sought ways to answer that question. She was hired by the Oh SNAP! campus food program as a student engagement assistant to help students apply for CalFresh, the California state program of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. The following academic year, King began an internship with the program, an experience that inspired her master’s thesis.
“For Heather’s MSW master’s project, she wanted to collect data that illustrated the conflicts in policies for students attempting to qualify for CalFresh,” said Jennifer Maguire, professor in the Department of Social Work and faculty adviser for Oh SNAP! “She did a literature search to see what work has been done previously on college student food insecurity and that was when we realized that there’s really very little scholarship that examines the issue. She wanted to put together a project that documents this issue and provides a more comprehensive picture from the students’ perspective.”
King was one of 10 graduate students nationwide invited to a United States Department of Agriculture 2015 Outlook Forum in February, an experience that added to her perspective. She discovered that many of the staff at the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) were simply unaware of college student food insecurity issues and the urgency surrounding them.
Several, however, were open to discussion, including Andrea Carlson, one of the researchers who helped develop the federal MyPlate nutrition guidelines. “She was welcoming and genuinely interested in the studies,” Maguire said. “Heather opened up lines of communication among herself, faculty at HSU, Carlson and other researchers at USDA ERS, who are interested in the publication of her thesis.”
“Highlighting the problem of food insecurity in the college student population is a newer idea for people because of the perceptions not only surrounding the demographics of college students, but also about the resources college students have,” King said. “Just because you get financial aid doesn’t mean you can cover your food, your rent, your textbooks, and lab equipment, your transportation, and everything else along with tuition. This is when we see food budgets–and nutrition–slashed.”
Information from a survey King conducted in researching her thesis, titled College Student Eligibility Barriers to CalFresh,” illustrates one of the greatest changes in what has long been considered the typical student. More than 20 percent of the respondents reported that they were parents.
“What often happens is parents give whatever food they have to their children, and they’ll eat what’s left,” King said. “They are fighting to create a better life for their family. They’re going to school, working, trying to fit it all in despite the fact they are often malnourished.”
That need is exacerbated by an outdated system that automatically disqualifies college students from CalFresh eligibility unless they meet specific exemptions, a distinction that doesn’t apply to other applicants. The policies in place since the 1970s haven’t been revisited since their origin.
One of the biggest barriers is a rule that requires most students to work at least 20 hours a week at a minimum wage job to be eligible. Jobs offering that many hours that can also fit into a student’s schedule are rare, and the requirement doesn’t take into account a student’s credit load, unpaid internship, or volunteer hours required by their academic programs.
However, there are circumstances that can still enable college students to qualify, and the Oh SNAP! crew has been instrumental in helping students find those gaps.
“Many students thought they wouldn’t qualify because of the work rule but after working with us, realized they did,” King said. “For instance, there are exemptions for student parents and students who qualify for work study.”
But making a more prominent difference will require much more information and communication, an initiative at the core of her master’s thesis.
“There are three bills coming up in California that are starting to slowly look at making changes to college student eligibility in California,” King said. “When I get the results we can pass the information through channels of communications that will hopefully encourage further evaluation.”
King says that analysis needs to reach beyond the state level, however, to address the much wider-reaching problem.
“I intended my master’s thesis to focus on eligibility barriers college students face in accessing CalFresh, but I learned that the primary barriers are all at the federal level,” she said. “That means millions of food-insecure college students may be affected by this.
“If we can broaden this evaluation on eligibility barriers, we can begin to build the foundation for tackling this on the national level. SNAP has enormous potential to help college students meet basic needs and fight malnourishment–and therefore to stay on track. Investing in college students now means an investment in society’s future professionals.”