@midwestsahm, Whoa! That is not what I said. I was talking about kids whose economic contribution, for whatever reason, is deemed essential to the family. Not to pay for new clothes or cable bills but to help fix the water heater or pay the light bill, or to feed the kids coming up behind them. A kid who has money for “more expensive restaurant food” is not going hungry on a regular basis.
@midwestahm
Well I don’t intend to assume things about people, but I do think that your views on college students are a bit uninformed. You probably wouldn’t be very happy about my situation because I’m an illegal (with DACA) at Columbia. I do work and I send some money to my parents because they are grossly underpaid and exploited by their employer. Do I go hungry? No. At least not because I don’t have access to food. Of course, my past experiences with food insecurity have affected my relationship with food to the point that I overdo it with the buffet that I’m offered every day (I’m getting better but I still feel like I have the body of a 40 year old man when I look at myself in the mirror). However, I do know people that do go hungry at Columbia because they have no choice. Perhaps they feel the guilt that they have excess while their parents have nothing and hence sacrifice their earnings to their parents. Or they feel the societal pressure that is especially intense at an Ivy League in the most expensive city in the country to keep up with the Rockefellers. Maybe they are enduring abuse. I’m not trying to rationalize them. I think their guilt and jealousy is completely irrational. But people are complicated and rather than blaming them or their parents, it’s important to step back and think holistically about the causes of this irrationality. Especially since the desire for food is a need that is pretty high in the hierarchy of needs and having people go against it takes a pretty large amount of trauma. Having circumstances that seem perfect on paper does not immediately shield people from adversity or guarantee them a spot in the elite (even with hard work).
^ I for one have no problem with you. People are complex. Situations are complex. Sometimes there is no bad guy.
Exactly. I have rich and poor friends. My rich friends are the ones that typically spend money on the expensive dinners and they typically have parents that pay full freight for them to attend. Even if they have financial insecurity, it is more along the lines of “I wish I could afford a designer skirt that someone I know has”. I’m not trying to belittle their problems, but there are radical differences between students of different socioeconomic levels and splurging by students or their families isn’t a prevailing reason why low income students deal with food insecurity.
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I know a few people mentioned getting part time jobs, but would everyone who wanted one be able to get one? Especially in a college town.
So much judgment. Everyone wants to police the behavior of low-income people.
Everyone wants to find a reason why the unfortunate situation of students going hungry is the fault of the individual students rather than the system. It’s easier to blame individual behavior. But individual behavior may not be at fault in all or even most cases.
I don’t get this. Knowing someone who now would be full ride at the Ivy we attended, he got aid for the dining plan. If someone decides they don’t want to use the dining plan, and don’t want to share their family info, or can’t (I also know someone who was thrown out of their house freshman year of college), well, maybe college as an 18 year old is not for them.
College is not a right. College may not be right for someone when they are 18.
If I was hungry on campus, I’d go to the (always free) counseling services and ask for help. Same for housing.
In the most basic way, I can compare it to having a disability. If you do not want to file the paperwork, if you “don’t want people in your business”, well, you ain’t gonna get accommodations. I am sorry you are disabled. But so am I, and I have to file paperwork up the wazoo. And my son is disabled and has to do the same to get accommodations in HS.
There is no entitlement to free things without proving you can’t get those things yourself. Yes, maybe there are emergencies, but NFN, how dare someone think that their situation is SO special that THEY don’t “have to” file paperwork to prove they need money?
My friend was on free and reduced lunches at various times in grade school. He would have gone hungry without it. If his mom had to suck it up as a single parent and admit - to a school district she attended as a kid - that she was too po’ to feed her kids - why can’t students, students smart enough to get into college - admit it?
Ugh, I don’t want to offend anybody, but really - y’all offend me as a disabled person that hungry students should be sought out and cared for any more than a disabled student. Because a disabled student gets no accommodations without paperwork!
@Sue22 “Whoa! That is not what I said. I was talking about kids whose economic contribution, for whatever reason, is deemed essential to the family.”
Then why did they enroll in the college??!
@brantly “So much judgment. Everyone wants to police the behavior of low-income people.”
Low-income students attend elite colleges for 100% free + refunds every term. If they mismanage or are irresponsible with those funds (or ignore policies and send money home) IT’S THEIR OWN FAULT for running into issues. Colleges roll out the red carpet to accommodate these kids. It’s frankly a joke that anyone would feel any sympathy for privileged kids making asinine decisions and acting hopeless on an elite campus. Calls into question their acceptance, if I’m being honest.
That is a truly preposterous statement.
Teens boast on social media they’re going to elites (and many flagship state schools) for 100% free, get to study abroad for 100% free, trips overseas with class for free, financial aid refunds to buy a new MacBook, on and on and on. But maybe they’re all lying.
I was an RA in college and low income students bragged about going for free and many would go shopping when their refunds came. This was over 25 years ago! The woe is me poor talk at an elite in 2018 is absurd. They ought to check their privilege.
@rhandco, What paperwork are you talking about? For federal food assistance? Local food pantries? Additional financial aid? Can you clarify what kind of paperwork these kids should be submitting?
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In the MIT survey, I didn’t see any student say they didn’t have enough money for food or that food wasn’t available. Some said the FA for books and supplies and other expenses was delayed at the beginning of every semester so they had to decide whether to use the money they had for food or books, but the food is actually available.
Some of the things they were complaining about had nothing to do with food. They didn’t have money for insurance when they weren’t on campus. They didn’t have money to pay for courses taken at another university when they were on leave from MIT. They didn’t have money to travel home (it didn’t say how often). One student had to pay her EFC because her parents refused to do so. One paid medical OOP because she didn’t want her parents to know about the treatment.
Schools can only do so much. If they allot the money to cover the COA, including food, insurance while at school, travel at the beginning and end of every semester, there really isn’t much that can be done if the student chooses to spend the money on other things or whats to take a leave from the school or wants to go home several times in a semester. If the parents won’t pay the EFC, should MIT just give more money? The schools are paying for all the things they agreed to pay for - tuition, meals on campus, books - but the students are using their food allotment for other expenses outside the COA.
@midwestsahm There are students who full into this category, getting what you would deem an “entirely free ride,” but they are from low income family and the “refund” you refer to is usually money to pay for food etc. I’ve known a couple of students in this category and they had very high financial need and one was a Gates Millennium Scholar. No one gets rich or lives a life on luxury on FA.
@twoinanddone MIT will cover the cost of medical insurance and OOP medical costs for students with very high financial need. I would agree that it is extremely rare for a student to have to chose between food and books. My experience is that the FA office is very supportive. Money is available. And MIT like Harvard and other Ivies, will also cover the cost of housing and food over breaks for students in need.
No school is totally free (nevermind with refunds) for poor kids. Every single one has a student contribution in the thousands of dollars.The lowest I’ve seen is $1500 first year/$2500 later years (it goes up as they expect you to get a better job in college summers), many are more like $4000. Plus there is always also a work-study award of $1-3000 - money not provided up front but given in paychecks after they find a job and work.
These funds are generally expected to cover books, travel to school, personal items, etc. So something between $3500 and $8k is expected of the very poorest students, and the not-as-wealthy schools will add $5500-7500 in loans per year to that.
You can verify this for yourself by running the NPC (Yale has a quick easy one) for a 0 EFC family with no assets at an elite, which will give you facts rather than repeating what random kids back in the day bragged about.
Because they don’t want their kids to be in a similar position? Because their parents are willing to try to sacrifice that contribution so their kids can have a better life? So these kids can help support the parents in their old age with the better jobs they’ll get with a degree?
I imagine it’s all the same reasons people suffer in the short term in pursuit of a long term goal.
I question whether the food is truly available in this situation. Students who delay purchasing books and supplies are setting themselves up for academic failure. They may not be able to complete the first few assignments in any of their courses, and they will fall way behind on the reading. The choice may well be between going hungry and flunking out. Should colleges be allowing their students to face such dilemmas, or should they be doing something to ensure that it doesn’t happen?
If they are living on campus and on a meal plan there is food available. My daughter is in this situation where she lives off campus (by choice) and her FA for the semester comes about 5 weeks after the semester starts. She has to figure out a way to get to school, pay her rent, buy her books, but her meal plan is ‘live’ at the beginning of the semester.
And she does figure it out without going hungry or falling being in her reading.
@IWillKillForMIT Your description remind me of Nina’s character in the Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights.
@twoinanddone, it sounds as though you are not helping her with this cash flow problem – which suggests that your family follows different principles than mine does. It would have been pretty much automatic for me to advance the kid the necessary money for transportation, the first two rent checks, and books before the semester begins, with the understanding that the kid would pay me back when the FA check arrives. (And in fact, I have given one of my kids short-term loans to deal with cash flow issues, and they’ve always been paid back promptly.) But perhaps you value the learning experience that the student would have from coping with the situation more than the stress relief of not having to cope with it?
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@brantly , people are judgemental because they pay for the poor and have been paying for over 50 years. The poorest people as a group are also the fattest, which is another problem, and which makes the student hunger situation particularly egregious. The best situation would be if we didn’t have any poor people because they all found good jobs, so no one would have any right to complain about them. But hunger in America is not acceptable except if by choice or bad judgement. Without some discipline of failure, people just don’t learn.