Cornell method of taking notes

Nick Droege, left, founder of Tiger Pantry food pantry for students, and Amanda Gray, operations coordinator for Tiger Pantry, walk through the facility during an opening ceremony in Columbia, Missouri on Oct. 1, 2012. The food pantry serves students in need of assistance in the Columbia area. August Kryger/Columbia Daily Tribune/AP

The hunger crisis in America’s universities

08 /18 /14 12 : 33 AM—UPDATED 09/03 /14 04 : 59 PM

Adapted from-- http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-hunger-crisis-americas-universities

By Ned Resnikoff

Hungry students usually don’t enter the on-campus food pantry at New York’s LaGuardia Community College; instead they sit in an office in the college’s financial services center while a staff member or volunteer goes to the pantry. The staff member brings back unmarked grocery bags of food for the student to take home.

Most of the Community College students don’t notice the food pantry. It’s in an unlabeled office, containing a series of unmarked file cabinets; it goes undetected– and that’s the point.

Dr. Michael Baston, the college’s Vice President of Student Affairs, says the whole process is designed to be invisible.

“We did this because we feel like it is a stigma-reducing strategy,” he said. “Because we want students to feel like all resources they need to sustain themselves are available to them.”

Fighting the Stigma

Battling stigma is a challenge for all types of food pantries, but the struggle appears to be especially strong on college campuses. After all, universities are thought of as areas of relative privilege. The usual thought is if you can afford to spend thousands of dollars a year on a college education, you can’t possibly be hungry enough to require emergency food assistance.

Rhondalisa Roberts, a LaGuardia sophomore and food pantry client, has witnessed that stigma firsthand. She says that when she suggested that a hungry classmate of hers visit the pantry, the classmate told her, “Oh, I’m not going to go there. I’m not poor.”

“It’s very, very alarming,” Roberts said. “Most students have a negative stigma when it comes to receiving help for food. Nobody wants to receive free food or seem needy, even when they are in dire need of resources.”

How Many Are Hungry?

It’s difficult to find out how many college students are in dire need, but new data from the country’s largest emergency food service network (Feeding America) suggests that the number is at least in the millions. Feeding America’s 2014 report, “Hunger in America,” estimates that roughly 10% of the 46.5 million adult clients they serve are currently students. This includes about two million people who are attending school full-time. Nearly one-third of those surveyed— 30.5%—report that they’ve had to choose between paying for food and covering educational expenses at some point in the last year.

Feeding America, a network of some 46,000 emergency food service agencies in the United States, releases its “Hunger in America” report once every four years. It is based on a survey of more than 60,000 Feeding America clients (people who need food assistance). This latest version of the report is the first one to include data about college students in need of emergency food services. The new research suggests that America’s chronic hunger emergency has spread to institutes of higher learning.

Increasing Food Insecurity

That is not surprising since food insecurity—defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as people’s lack of “access to enough food for an active, healthy life”—has been rising steadily for years. The situation became a true crisis after the 2008 financial collapse, which caused many more people to become food insecure. The food insecurity rate increased by 24% in a single year, according to USDA figures. In response, the federal government approved an emergency distribution of money into the federal food assistance program for low-income people. This program is called the food stamp program. However, the government started reducing those additional funds in November 2013 even though the food insecurity levels stayed high. This decline in funding and continued high number of people in need caused emergencies for local food assistance programs across the country.

As food insecurity rose, it also began to affect homes that had never experienced a lack of food before. Data published by Feeding America in April 2014 suggests that 27% of food insecure people don’t qualify for food stamps because their incomes are too high. Additionally, as food insecurity continued to rise, college enrollment rates rose also because college is seen as a step to economic security.

“Poor people and people who struggle with food insecurity didn’t used to go to college. … If they were going to get education, they were going to get the free part (through high school) and that’s all,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. “But there’s been such a strong cultural and economic push for college that now even people with low financial resources are pursuing it.”

Hungry College Students

Because more low-income individuals go to college and food insecurity has risen to include part of the middle class, hunger has spread across America’s university campuses like never before. In some places, it’s practically a pandemic: At Western Oregon University, 59% of the student body is food insecure, according to researchers from Oregon State University (OSU). A 2011 survey of the City University of New York (CUNY) found that 39.2% of the university’s 250,000 undergraduates had experienced food insecurity at some time in the past year.

However, it’s not only undergraduates; the number of food insecure graduate students is also growing. Between 2007 and 2010, according to a 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education analysis, the number of food stamp recipients with a master’s

degree rose from 101,682 to 293,029. At one large research school, Michigan State University (MSU), the on-campus food pantry (also called a food bank) reports that more than half of its clients are graduate students.

Ying Liu, a doctoral student in chemical engineering and occasional client of the MSU Food Bank, told msnbc that MSU undergraduates are more likely to be able to call on their parents and other sources of financial support when necessary. Graduate students tend to have less of a safety net. At the same time, they’re more likely to have families of their own, who they have to support with their small income.

“A lot of students who are married have to support their children,” said Liu. “Their family is dependent on them.”

One Student’s Story

Kristin Sewell is an example of this type of student. An anthropologist and doctoral student, Sewell is raising a teenage son while pursuing her degree at MSU. Her 20-year-old daughter is in college herself. Sewell told msnbc that her small fellowship salary is usually enough to buy her own food although she has gone to the MSU Food Bank “when money got particularly tight.”

For example, she hadn’t expected her heating bills to be as high as they were during the first winter. “I hadn’t planned for $500 electric bills. So then I decided to use the food pantry just to make ends meet.”

Her decision was shaped, partially, by her own childhood.

“As a kid, I had experienced hunger,” said Sewell. “I grew up with a single parent in Southern California, and we often went to bed hungry. I didn’t want my kids to experience that, so I didn’t hesitate to go to the food pantry when I needed to.”

Inhibiting Learning

Sara Goldrick-Rab from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reminds us that “being hungry inhibits learning”. She describes how many hungry students find they can only afford to pay for food if they don’t purchase class materials such as books. In that situation, “you’re not studying with the right materials, so your grades go down, so you lose financial aid,” she said. The loss of that aid can be the final challenge that forces students to quit school.

“I certainly don’t think we as a country ever agreed that this is an okay way to do things,” said Goldrick-Rab. “We agreed to give people financial aid so they don’t have to starve to go to school.”

Growth of University Food Pantries

It can be difficult for many small food pantries to provide high-quality food or other essentials, but the MSU Food Bank does pretty well. It offers meat and toiletries like toothpaste to its clients. In part, that’s because MSU has been in the food pantry game for a long time. MSU’s Food Bank, which first opened its doors in 1993, is the oldest student-run, on-campus emergency food program in the United States. Just over two decades later, the program serves about 2,200 clients, from an overall student population of nearly 50,000.

On-campus food pantries were extremely rare when the MSU Food Bank first launched. Students and administrators have noticed the rising hunger in their schools, though, so more and more schools have started pantries in recent years. Meanwhile, Nate Smith-Tyge, MSU Food Bank’s current director and a PhD student in the university’s Higher Education program, started getting emails from people on other university campuses. They were asking questions about how the MSU Food Bank is run.

“About a year and a half ago, I was getting so many of those inquiries that I started to think about starting some kind of association,” said Smith-Tyge. He ended up connecting with Clare Cady, Human Resource Center coordinator and food pantry administrator for the Oregon State University. Together, Cady and Smith-Tyge founded the College and University Food Bank Alliance (CUFBA) in March 2013. Nearly a year and a half later, CUFBA has members running food pantries at about 100 universities nationwide. Smith-Tyge said he’s also aware of about 30 additional on-campus food pantries in the United States that are not members of the CUFBA.

The CUFBA is still growing. Every week, it receives at least one email from a new university where people are interested in establishing a food pantry. When that happens, Cady and Smith-Tyge give advice and connect that university’s students with more experienced food pantry administrators in the region. The biggest challenge, said Cady, is “creating sustainable programming.” It takes a lot work and strong partnerships to keep a food bank program going.