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The Hechinger Report
OPINION: The low-cost steps the government could take right now to ease hunger and homelessness on college campuses
The U.S. Department of Education must create an Office of Basic Needs
to incentivize schools to ensure students have enough to eat and a
place to sleep
By Abigail Seldin and Alice Yao
September 3, 2020
Each new day brings another round of headlines about the struggles of
the nation’s colleges to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, the arrival
of freshmen in reduced-occupancy dormitories, the limitations of remote
learning and a sports season that seems unlikely to get off the ground.
But outside the spotlight, away from the media and the public’s
attention, millions of students are asking themselves one pressing
question: Will I have enough money to buy groceries and pay rent in
September?
Prior to Covid-19, Temple University’s Hope Center for College,
Community and Justice, surveying nearly 167,000 students at 227
institutions, found 39 percent of participants had been food insecure
in the previous 30 days, and the numbers are now worse. As we consider
how to support students, we need to prioritize making sure they have
enough to eat and a safe place to sleep along with providing
high-quality instruction and internet access.
Food and housing insecurity among college students isn’t new, but it
has been exacerbated by the pandemic and accompanying economic
calamity. With our country poised for years of high unemployment and
stagnation, our system of higher education must address this food and
housing crisis without further delay. Over the past few months, we have
identified several ways the U.S. Department of Education can
immediately increase support for struggling students across the country.
We propose that the department create an Office of Basic Needs
dedicated to understanding and solving these issues. This office, which
would be led by a director of basic needs, would report directly to the
undersecretary of education, who has the primary responsibility for
higher education policy at the department. The role of this office
would be to coordinate the department’s response and efforts to help
ensure that students at all educational levels have access to food,
housing and child care, as well other goods and services that are
critical to a student’s educational success, such as internet. The
office would also coordinate with other federal agencies, such as the
departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Housing and
Urban Development, and be an active member of the Interagency Council
on Homelessness.
Under the direction of the Office of Basic Needs, the Department of
Education should launch a “Basic Needs Gold Standard” program, a
voluntary, nationwide effort to recognize schools that are successfully
meeting the basic needs of their students. In 2013, the departments of
Education and Veterans Affairs jointly challenged schools to adopt best
practices to support the educational success of veterans. When the “8
Keys to Veterans’ Success” program was first announced, more than 250
community colleges and universities immediately introduced it on their
campuses. As of 2020, nearly 2,300 colleges and universities have
joined the program.
We believe the department should take a similar approach here, by
publicizing a list of standards that schools must voluntarily adopt in
order to be designated a “Basic Needs Gold Standard” institution. To
meet this standard, an institution would have to demonstrate how it has
met specific criteria, including: surveying its student body to
identify unmet needs; collaborating with community organizations like
food banks and child care centers; partnering with state and local
agencies to get more eligible students enrolled in benefits programs
like food stamps and rental assistance; publicizing available resources
throughout the school community and making those resources convenient
and easy to access; and offering appropriate training and resources so
that faculty and staff are better able to identify students who would
benefit from basic needs assistance.
The department would publicize this initiative by developing a
dedicated website, hosting a forum or conference to share and discuss
ideas on how best to support students and publicly recognizing schools
that are part of the initiative.
Beyond public recognition, the department could provide financial
incentives to address hunger, homelessness and child care insecurity by
adding the criteria for the “Basic Needs Gold Standard” program as a
supplementary priority for awarding discretionary grants. Grants to
postsecondary institutions could be conditioned on schools’ adequately
demonstrating, and regularly reporting on, how they are meeting their
students’ basic needs and the criteria outlined in the “Basic Needs
Gold Standard” program.
Intervening to ensure students have adequate food and housing isn’t
just compassionate – it is critical to protecting the financial
interests of the government overall.
These steps could be adopted today, without authorization or
appropriation from Congress. Intervening to ensure students have
adequate food and housing isn’t just compassionate – it is critical to
protecting the financial interests of the government overall. We know
from exhaustive research that hunger seriously impairs learning
outcomes and that financial insecurity drives dropout rates. Previous
Department of Education publications acknowledge that dropping out of
college increases the likelihood of student loan default and poses a
risk to the overall federal student loan portfolio. At the
institutional level, retaining students is crucial to a college’s
ability to survive this ongoing recession without additional painful
layoffs.
Regardless of whether the school year happens in person or on Zoom,
students’ access to housing and food will be a factor in both
individual academic success and institutional survival. There is no
time to waste.
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