It’s often assumed that a college student living on ramen or going to events for free pizza is just part of the experience of being a “starving student.” But the data show a much grimmer reality: 56% of college students nationally have experienced housing insecurity and 40% of students at UC Berkeley are food insecure. How can this issue be tackled when the narrative downplays the depth of the problem?  

In this episode, Sarah Edwards (MPP 2020) speaks with national and local experts on their efforts to change that narrative and provide real support to students. Sarah turns to Marissa Meyers from the Hope Center at Temple University for the national perspectives and to Ruben Canedo and Maria Balcazar Tellez* from the Berkeley Basic Needs Center for what’s happening on the UC Berkeley campus. Tune in to learn more about the challenges that many students face and the progress toward solutions.  

What more can you do? Our team suggests you start here: 

1. Check out the most recent report from the Hope Center with results from their “Real College” Survey 
2. Follow the conversations around concerns with the cost of college and around funding basic needs on college campuses—we suggest this brief, this article, and this report as a place to start.  
3. Help change the narrative downplaying the challenges many students face. Talk to the people in your life about this issue, share your story through the #realcollege campaign, or volunteer with the Berkeley Basic Needs Center.  

* The episode incorrectly identifies Maria Balcazar Tellez as Maria Tellez. We apologize for the error.

Transcript

Ruben Canedo Think about the day to day experience of college students today. They wake up and they see lower bank accounts than ever before. They see higher rent prices than ever before and they don't know if they're going to eat that day.That's what's happening. While students are having to take on full academic course loads at one of the highest ranking universities in the world. That's the day to day experience of undergraduate and graduate students at UC Berkeley.

Sarah Edwards That was Ruben Canedo from the Berkeley Basic Needs Center.The issue of student poverty has frequently been ignored, been swept aside or been rationalized in the stories of ramen and leftovers from free events—just being a part of the student experience. Despite the narratives, many students nationally and here at Berkeley are unable to meet their basic needs. When we talk about this, we mean that students are not able to buy enough food or are not able to meet rent. On the Berkeley campus, thirty-nine percent of undergraduates experience food insecurity. On a national level, fourteen percent of students at community colleges are homeless. I'm Sara Edwards and this is Talk Policy to Me. Let's talk about supporting students basic needs. First off, we want to understand the national landscape around basic needs for college students. The Hope Center for College Community and Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia is one of the major groups addressing these issues on that national level. Marissa Meyers is a practitioner and researcher at the Hope Center.

Marissa Meyers I grew up in and out of the foster care system in Philly. And so for me, a big part of this has been to make sure that students don't have to go through the same struggles that I did. And if there's anything that I can do, whether that's sharing my story, contributing to research or getting out there and teaching practitioners how to advocate for students and help support them, this is something I've wanted to do all my life.

Sarah Marissa's  work and the work at the Hope Center has been having a major impact. Most recently, the Hope Center has been working on a real college survey to understand the challenges that students face as they try to make their basic needs. Marissa helped us unpack the data and the gaps within it.

Marissa Meyers But we do see that the trends are pretty similar year to year and by institution. The biggest difference we're seeing is between the four year universities and community colleges. So we're seeing that the community colleges are experiencing homelessness, food insecurity and housing insecurity at higher rates than four-year institutions. But that doesn't mean that's not happening there, we know that, based on our data from previous years, that over half of students at community colleges are food insecure and housing  insecure with 14 percent being homeless. And 14 percent doesn't sound like a very large number, but when you think about it, we're not talking about students who are couch surfing. We're talking about teens who don't have a place to live and are sleeping outside the Bay under bridges, sitting in their cars...that is something that's very common, especially in California.

Sarah In my mind, 14 percent homelessness is really high. How did we get here?  Financial aid feels like it's the main thing that we talk about when we talk about college affordability but that's obviously not the full picture.

Marissa Meyers  We know that when you know when students are leaving high school or sometimes when students are entering college, maybe from taking time off, maybe trying to attend college and it not working out and going back a second time, we recognize that financial aid is one piece of the puzzle. And so you're trying to figure out "how do I afford college,"" How do I get off the FAFSA," " How do I make sure that I can capitalize on the most amount of financial aid possible as well as scholarships," and things like that. And what we often forget is, once you figure out how to how to pay for college, what does that then mean for your housing and food? So students have to figure out "how do I get an apartment, how much is it going to cost, do I have any roommates, am I from out of state, will I know anyone, do I have a good credit score, money for utilities, do I hire first class security..." For apartments, so if your apartment is two thousand dollars a month, and you need first class security and [inaudible], that's six thousand dollars that you need to come up with upfront. A lot of people won't let you put that on a credit card. So, when we think about the various education, paying for school and student loan debt is one of the biggest things we talk about. But we fail to recognize that that doesn't solve all the issues. The more we talk about this topic, the more evident it becomes that real college is more than just tuition.

Sarah There are so many ways in which they're supposed to be things that are meant to help but they're just not accessible to those who need it the most. I'm thinking especially about national benefits like food stamps or the SNAP program. I know that the data shows that there are a lot of people who could be using these benefits but aren't enrolled in them. What are the barriers for students around this?

Marissa Meyers We have over 10 million students who are low income who meet the eligibility requirements to get help so they can have food and they don't have to be hungry. But they're not getting that support, it's not an easy process. You mess up one little thing, they send you an application back and you got to start all over again. So it's a very complicated process. Students are pulling all nighters their exams, what about SNAP benefits and being able to fill out an application like that. Students already feel like they're pressed for time, especially for those who are working. How do you then get to give them enough time to do that? It's really challenging.

Sarah Edwards Thinking about how we can help students navigate any of these systems, there's actually some major strides being made right here on the Berkeley campus. When we come back, we'll consider how Berkeley is working to assist students to meet their basic needs and how this team is pushing back against the narratives that have historically reduced access.

Ad  A huge congratulations to the Goldman School Class of 2019. Next week, Master of Public Policy, Master of Public Affairs and doctoral students will graduate from GSPP. Your Talk Policy to Me hosts are all first year MPP students, and we're inspired by our classmates heading across the nation and the world to make their communities better. Congratulations to our friends, Colleagues and future public policy leaders. Go get 'em. 

Sarah Edwards Welcome back. Before the break, we were speaking with Marissa Meyers from the Hope Center in Philadelphia about the national implications of student needs. Now, we turn to what's happening here at Berkeley. In March, Berkley opened to the basic needs center a one-stop shop for student basic needs. I sat down with Rubin Canedo who we heard from in the beginning and Maria Belcazar guy from the basic needs group to learn about their work and about the new center.

Ruben Canedo UC Berkeley basic needs efforts is bringing together community on and off campus to facilitate research that includes evaluation and reporting on our efforts. Prevention interventions, which is how do we drive the current thirty-nine percent of undergraduates and twenty-three percent of graduate students that are expensing food insecurity, and then the 10 percent of campus community members that at some point experience homelessness, to a minimum. So we want to have a prevention model as opposed to a crisis-response model. We still haven't figured out how to remove poverty from the human experience and we haven't figured out how to remove intersectional oppression from it.The basic needs team is also working on advocacy at multiple levels. But that's not the only thing that makes Berkeley's approach stand out. They're also working to address this issue that Marissa brought up about how challenging it can be for students to access services that can improve their lives.

 I think something that makes Berkeley unique in the way that we've approach the basic needs center is that we prioritize having a dedicated space here that's going to be used by on-and-off campus partners. We can centralize direct services as opposed to having to welcome students and then move them to multiple other spaces where they can get supported. Our goal is to incubate it and make it as seamless as possible.

Maria Balcazar Tellez I think to add to what Ruben just mentioned that was something that was very deliberate in our efforts. A lot of research suggests that by centralizing all these efforts and making sure that students have one location where they can access and ask all the questions and do all the things that they need to do, we actually improve our efforts serving the students that need to be served.

Ruben Canedo We don't know who was the first student that struggled whether basic needs when they went to college. You wouldn't know because there weren't dedicated spaces where students can go and share that they were struggling either with their economic experience or food experience or their housing experience. Over time, there's been a lot of individual isolated efforts that have happened with students showing up with another student and a student supporting them with a little bit of money or food or housing, or a staff member doing that, or a faculty member doing that, an administrator doing that. We didn't know how rampant that was until we started having the conversation and it happened, really, as response to the recession that hit in 2008 and 2009 that now wasn't even about paying for school. It was about paying for their housing and their food at a way that it was no longer the students that historically, we've known struggled with that. And there's a lot to say of that. There's a certain level of comfortability with the people that we have been programmed and socialized to really not care or push them outside of the circle of care–folks that have negative incomes, no incomes or low incomes. But now after the recession, it was working class, it was middle class, and it was the folks that are just in between that threshold middle and upper class that lost so much in the recession.

Maria Balcazar Tellez Data suggest that it disproportionately affects students of color, LGBTQ plus community members, as well as single mothers or students depending on what degree they're in in graduate programs. Ultimately, we know for a fact that close to 40 percent of students that are experiencing food insecure at any point in time, as well as homelessness, is actually pretty prevalent.

Sarah Given a disproportionate impact how do we start to understand where this comes from and how deep the problem runs?

Ruben Canedo This is a challenge that is systemic. It's systemic in the context that, when you look at public higher education today, and you look at what public higher education used to be right in the 60s to now, it's such a drastically different financial reality. Specifically at the federal level, we have something called the Pell Grant that was originally created so that we could support community members that were coming back from World Wars and any war that we were involved in. It used to be able to cover north of 70 percent of your total cost of attendance.

And for folks that don't speak financial language, total cost of attendance goes beyond tuition and fees. Tuition and fees is a portion of it, but then you're talking about cost of living which most folks have no idea that the largest debt generator for college students is not tuition and fees, it's the cost of living. It's rent, it's utilities, it's transportation, it's your food, so on and so forth. Today, the Pell Grant is at a four-decade low. So you need to start with that because there's a lot of folks who say "well I was able to go to college and I worked my way through college and I studied really hard and I graduated without any debt." Well that's wonderful, but what was the income back then? What was the cost of living back then? And what did the financial aid that you had available to you do, back then, in that context? So when you think about less purchasing power of the financial aid that previous generations have gotten from the federal to the state. And when you think about higher cost of living, that's not an equation that adds up to college students having a more affordable and equitable college experience–whether you're going as an undergraduate or a graduate student. And there's a lot to say about graduate students, because graduates don't have even half of the infrastructure of financial aid that I just explained, and is at one of its historic lows. So all of that is accumulating to the day-to-day experiences of students being much more worried about their finances, about their food and about their housing than ever before.

It's a challenge that is happening across the country. And if you happen to be in areas that have a more expensive cost of living, then it's a different type of struggle in the same way that you have to adapt to. Maybe your cost of living isn't very high, but the housing availability is very scarce. So maybe it's not a matter of the cost of living in that area but it's the fact that there is no housing and you have to live further and further away. Or,you have to live in more and more compromising living situations which then impacts everything else.

Sarah While the issue might present itself slightly different in different geographies, one thing that unfortunately has been consistent has been this narrative that downplays the issue of students not being able to meet their needs. Instead, it pushes the idea that students should be short on funds while they're in school. That students living on ramen, or students going to events just for the food, is fine and is acceptable. Which, in-and-of itself, is super problematic and also disregards the depth of challenges that many students are facing.

Ruben Canedo We have an opportunity in this basic needs conversation to generate some intentional healing justice here. When I hear folks say, "well college students have always struggled," and "college students have always had to eat ramen," and,  "college students have always had..." and et cetera, et cetera. So the narrative that we have normalized, the very unhealthy and trauma-generating experience of the college experience, we have an opportunity to intervene through a healing-justice framework. Which this acknowledges the fact that when a person responds in that way, the question is "did you experience that? When you went to college what was your economic food and housing experience? Because maybe the reason why you're asking in that way, and why you're showing up in that way, why your energy is in that way, is because you struggled and nobody was there for you. And you have to tell yourself 'well everybody's going through this. So that's why I'm just going to go through it myself.' And you figured out ways to do that. Was it the healthiest college experience? Was it the most generative college experience? If you would go back, would you keep it the exact same? Or, if you would go back and there was a place like a basic needs center, would you show up to the basic needs center and say 'hey, I need help and I hear that you all help people.'" And we could have been there to help you.

Just because you experience severe challenges and traumas, does not make that a right of passage for future generations to have to experience that unhealthy and traumatic experience, even just from a performance lens. Let's say we don't care about your health experience. That's it. We don't care that you're experiencing poverty, and hunger, malnourishment, and/or homelessness. Let's say we don't care about any of that. But if we do care about performance, if we do care about GPA's, and persistence in graduation rates, and we know that all of those factors impact those, then at least through a performance index, we would prioritizes this and say, "you know what? Enough.

Sarah Right. So either from an analytical perspective or from a human-centered perspective, finding a way to support students seems like something that we simply just should be doing. But why aren't we? What are the roadblocks that are stopping us from addressing this? What's kept California from investing in student basic needs beyond just investing in financial aid?

Ruben Canedo You know a lot of folks are saying "Oh we we just provide financial aid, the money, then students are not going to need basic needs." Well, you need to know what that means. That means that you have to adjust the Pell Grant by inflation, which is at a four-decade low. So good luck with that, especially in this administration. Second thing is that you need to have the Cal Grant, California's Pell Grant comparable, be adjusted to support what the Pell Grant is not covering, which again it's in a four decade low. So good luck with that again.

You need to have a thriving financial aid package, basic need centers that are going to take care of everything else that financial aid is not going to take care of.

Financial aid is not going to help you with signing up for a Cal Fresh. That's federally SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which is EBT, formerly food stamps. The state is ranked forty-eighth in SNAP dollars in the country. California is number one in snap-eligible population. We need those federal dollars to come to our state and contribute to our local economies. College students, through a lot of advocacy, there's much better clarity of how college students can be eligible and apply for a Cal Fresh. On this campus, three years ago, we were at 20 applications. Last year, we were at thirteen-hundred applications. So we can do this work, it's just a matter of prioritizing, and that's the direction that we're headed.

Sarah OK, so we need to do all of this. We need to push for more financial aid and we also need to make sure that we have the ability to support student needs beyond what it financially covers. So while we're on Cal Fresh, it jumps out to me that the change in application numbers is about an increase in access for sure, but it's also about a reduction in stigma. So part of this can be done through policy change but part is also about how we talk about this problem and how we want to talk about the solutions. Why does it seem like people are avoiding having the conversation about this?

Ruben Canedo You know there's really phenomenal universities across the country, community colleges, to research 1.) Universities that have been doing this work but nobody gives them the attention. Nobody gives them the focal point honoring the great work that they've been doing because so much of this of this work has historically and intentionally been silenced. Let's not talk about that students are struggling with their economic food or housing expenses when they come to this college, because then students are not going to want to come.

Let's not talk about that we're doing this because if we do, then we're going to start getting questions about what we're doing, what we're not doing, how well we're doing. Like, there's always this fear, theres this risk adversary to it, there's this assumed negative intent. And what we're showing now is that this is what happens when you approach it through a village-strategy. Which is, we're all in this, everybody is already impacted by this. So either we're going to address it and find strategic and better ways of addressing it together, or, we're going to continue to not address it and then wait for things to bubble up. Then this becomes the stories and podcasts and newspapers and social media posts that go viral and all that kind of stuff.

And then it becomes about that individual person. That individual person gets sensationalized, that individual person gets supported. But the system stays the same.We can't keep doing that anymore. We can't just keep lifting the individual stories of people who have weathered the most epic challenges and have now become leaders and we're like "look that's how you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to be able to live through poverty and hunger and homelessness and become an elected official. That's the American dream." That can't continue to be our story. We can't continue to put people through the most unhealthy conditions and traumatic experiences and then get placed into positions of leadership and say "if they could then everybody else should." You know, the state of California continues to substantially fund its corrections state-system way more than its public higher-education system. How long do we want to keep doing that? How long are we going to continue to prioritize sending youth and adults to prison than investing in youth to go to college, and for adults to have access to a community college and then go on their journeys. So it's a priorities-conversation that we're trying to figure out. Because we can do this, it's just a matter of changing the strategy towards generative versus punitive.

Sarah If we're thinking about how we can make this generative, what can we as individuals be doing?

Maria Balcazar Tellez  I think something that would be very meaningful and I think we need to have more of, is just conversations around basic needs and security, and conversations in the classroom around basic needs and security. We've done a good amount of advocacy trying to get all faculty to put in their syllabus information. If you are experiencing homelessness, if you're experiencing food insecurity, these are the resources. These are the folks you can reach out to. It is normal, close to 40 percent of undergrads experience it, close 25 percent of grads experience it, and 10 percent experience homeless. So normalizing the conversation rather than shaming it or rather than just putting it aside, I think is a major thing. And I think also to that, really it is about how do we think a little bit more as GSI's, as readers, as faculty, when we see folks in the classroom falling asleep. When we see folks in the classroom coming to your events because they are looking for the pizza rather than what you're talking about. Just having those conversations one-to-one and touching base. Really connecting with students rather than penalizing them because they're falling asleep on class, because the reality is that they might be sleeping in the library rather than in their bed.

I think if you're a student that is listening, that is experiencing this challenge, something is going on that's negatively impacting your basic needs, and you're at UC Berkeley, come to the Basic Needs Center, and that's what we're here for. Know that you're not alone, and know that these are folks who are waking up every day thinking about you, and showing up to this space excited to be here for you and to strategize how to best support you.

That's number one, cause there's way too many students that are struggling out there.

Sarah Changing the narrative around students in need is not easy. The work of the Basic Needs Center and the Hope Center is a really strong first step. Policy change requires changes in public opinion as well as changes in funding streams and in implementation. We can hope that all of the efforts, ongoing, will be effective in moving us forward.

[To Ruben and Maria] One more thing. There's someone listening who wants to come in. What do they need to know? How did they get here? What are your hours?

Ruben Canedo [Chuckles] Yeah, great question. So, we are at UC Berkeley's MLK Student Union. We're located in the B North location, so just follow the science towards B North. The best thing you can do is you can go to basicneeds.berkeley.edu. We have all of our information there.

Sarah At the basic needs center is open this summer from 12:00 to 4:00 Monday through Friday. Go to their website to learn more.

Talk Policy to Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans. For show notes, wisit us at talkpolicytome.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions.Talk Policy to Me's executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. Michael Quiroz is our audio engineer. Julie Villanueva and Selina Knowles are marketing assistants. I'm Sarah Edwards. Catch you next time.