California colleges full of hungry students

(Mercury News)
That old line about getting college students to attend events on campus by offering free pizza is no joke for some young people these days.

In a first-of-its-kind study that looks into the issue of hunger on college campuses nationwide, 13 percent of households with students at community colleges and 11 percent with students at four-year colleges worried about having enough money to buy food in 2015.

It’s a problem that some schools say has become more prevalent in recent years.

And while the figures released by the Urban Institute may be alarming, critics say they are too low, especially when it comes to hunger on campuses throughout California.

Esteban, a UC Berkeley student who did not want to use his last name, was down to one meal a day during his sophomore year. Unable to afford anything more, he’d have a smoothie in the morning and eat dinner in the afternoons. “This had a negative impact on my health and led to poor performance in my academics and at work,” he wrote recently.

A 2016 survey conducted by the University of California found that Esteban’s story is hardly unique. As many as one in five students in the system go hungry, and a separate report by California State University suggested about one in four of its students don’t have enough to eat.

UC Berkeley’s food pantry served over 2,000 students last spring, said Ruben Canedo, who spearheads the school’s efforts to make sure students have enough to eat and helps lead a systemwide UC committee created several years ago to address the issue.

Last fall, as demand rose, the school became the first in the Bay Area to partner with the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Not long afterward, Cal State East Bay and Laney College, in Oakland, also began working with the food bank. San Jose State University partnered with Second Harvest to bring a mobile food pantry offering fresh vegetables and meat to campus.

“It used to be that students had difficulty affording tuition and textbooks,” said Carolyn Hsieh, a student who served as operations coordinator at Cal’s food pantry, in a statement when the partnership was announced, “but today, it’s about the cost of housing. Our hunger studies show that students will pay for housing, utilities and other essential bills, but then start cutting out medication and food, which are the only things they can manipulate.”

It’s a topic that’s also caught the attention of lawmakers.

“This is an issue that I think has started to garner more attention overall,” said Kristin Blagg, the lead author of the Urban Institute report.

In the last couple of years, the state has made it easier for students to apply for food stamps and for colleges to identify which students might need help, and there is some movement to do the same at the national level. Esteban, the Berkeley student, was able to enroll in CalFresh, the state’s food assistance program, and says he can focus on school now that he no longer worries about where he’s going to find his next meal.

The state recently allocated several million dollars each for the UC, CSU and community college systems to build up their response to the problem of hunger on campus and reach out to students. But as these changes make it likely that more hungry students will come forward on campuses across the state, the schools will face the challenge of supporting them. “I think that’s a legitimate concern,” said Christopher Nellum, California-based policy director for Young Invincibles, a national group that advocates for young people.

Right now, the process of applying for and receiving food can be confusing, students say, and many who got free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch as K-12 students suddenly find themselves struggling to navigate the system in college.

And while the Urban Institute report suggests things have improved for some students since the recession in 2008, Canedo says the rising cost of living in the Bay Area means the problem is as pressing as ever here, and not just for poor students.

“As much as we might want to think it’s a low-income issue, it’s not,” he said. “Now you have working-class students, now you have middle-class students who are experiencing food insecurity and housing insecurity for the very first time.”

That’s true at other schools in the area, too. So instead of a counselor here or professor there offering hungry students instant soup stocked away in an office drawer, schools are taking a more formal approach to dealing with hunger.

In the last several years, Laney College has established its own food bank for hungry students, building on an effort that had been started by Restoring Our Communities Initiative, a campus group run by and for formerly incarcerated students. The group regularly handed out granola bars and apples to students before the Associated Students of Laney College stepped in and expanded the program.

Across the Bay, worries about going hungry are also a problem at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills and De Anza College in Cupertino, which recently began working with a local food bank to meet demand. Both schools have had food pantries for some time.

Rob Mieso, associate vice president for student service at De Anza, however, said: “I think it’s actually getting worse.” As rent prices go up, he added, so does need. The school’s foundation recently created a way for alumni and others in the community to direct their donations toward helping hungry students and their families.

Canedo, at Berkeley, is encouraged by all the attention student hunger is garnering. Solving the problem, he said, “is no longer a small scale operation.”

And it’s an operation that is constantly evolving.

“The landscape is shifting so much every week,” Canedo said. “This is something that is such a hot piece of clay that continues to be shaped every single week."