3 in 5 US undergrads struggle with basic needs. How some colleges are helping.
The food pantry at Austin Community College’s Highland campus was busy, with a steady stream of students stocking up on essentials. Many items had posted limits – one cabbage, two onions, three potatoes – but zucchini were in abundance. “Take more,” the cashier urged the shoppers, some stopping in between classes.
And they did.
With 3 in 5 American undergraduates reporting food or housing insecurity, a new model of support has taken hold on college campuses. From Harvard University to Hostos Community College in New York City to the University of Minnesota, schools are offering food pantries, emergency grants, and transportation help. It is a matter of survival – for both students and colleges.
Why We Wrote This
Students without basic resources often drop out. Schools that support undergraduates’ basic needs are reporting better retention and narrower achievement gaps.
It’s also a significant expansion of colleges’ traditional role.
“Some people look at these efforts and wonder, ‘Why would a college provide this?’” said Marisa Vernon-White, vice president of enrollment management and student services at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. “They ask, ‘Isn’t your job education and workforce training?’”
But Ms. Vernon-White and others say it’s in colleges’ best interest to see their roles more broadly. Students who lack resources – who have to skip meals or hunt for a safe place to sleep – often drop out, costing colleges millions in unrealized revenue at a time of declining enrollment and shrinking public funding.
Colleges that have committed to addressing students’ basic needs report improvements in retention and a narrowing of achievement gaps.
In the six years since Lorain Community College opened an Advocacy and Resource Center, the share of students graduating on time has risen 15 percentage points, to roughly 40%.
How we got here
A college education has traditionally provided a golden ticket to the middle class, a stepping stone to higher pay, better job prospects, and a more secure future. But its price tag keeps rising. And student aid isn’t keeping pace. Fifty years ago, the federal Pell Grant covered three-quarters of the cost of attending a four-year public college. Today, it covers less than a quarter.
The result: a growing number of students struggle to afford food or stable housing, especially in the nation’s community colleges, which serve 40% of all undergraduates. About 14% of students report experiencing homelessness, according to a survey by The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Such statistics have spurred colleges of all types – including elite schools trying to help break cycles of generational poverty – to create a range of basic support services. Some even help students apply for food stamps and other public benefits. It’s partly about the math. But it’s also about building community.
An early leader in the culture of care
Few college leaders have tackled student poverty as systemically as Russell Lowery-Hart, chancellor of Austin Community College, a large public college district with 11 locations across central Texas.
Before coming to Austin in 2023, Dr. Lowery-Hart served as president of Amarillo College, a community college in the Texas Panhandle. There, he built a “Culture of Caring” that has been studied by researchers, replicated by colleges, and credited with raising Amarillo’s graduation rate by 13 percentage points during his tenure.
“Our students are an $88 emergency away from dropping out,’’ Dr. Lowery-Hart said on Community College Podcast. “We have to help our students with their basic need barriers if we are going to help them with their learning and their degree completion.’’
Now, as Dr. Lowery-Hart takes his model to Austin Community College, a district with more than four times as many students as Amarillo, the movement he launched a decade ago feels more established and yet more vulnerable than ever.
These days, most colleges – public, private, two-year, and four-year alike – provide students with some basic needs support. Some – mostly wealthier four-year programs – also offer scholarships that help cover room and board.
In Congress and state legislatures, lawmakers from both political parties are raising alarms about student hunger and homelessness, and introducing legislation to expand basic needs support.
Yet many of the basic services colleges offer – running on an average budget of just $12,000 – are understaffed and underfunded. And resources are likely to become even scarcer in the coming years, as state legislatures, forced to shoulder more of the costs of public benefits programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as “SNAP,’’, and Medicaid, scale back spending in other areas.
A vision of care
When Dr. Lowery-Hart first introduced his vision of love-centered leadership to Amarillo’s general assembly in 2015, many faculty were skeptical, he recalls.
Some saw the vision as “unserious” – a threat to academic rigor.
Other faculty members said they resented Dr. Lowery-Hart’s decision to invest in students after faculty and staff layoffs. In one survey, a professor wrote that the college was “killing faculty positions to pay for the president’s ‘poor children’ schemes.”
“They said, ‘You’re asking us to love students, and no one is loving us,’” Dr. Lowery-Hart recalled.
Back then, most college leaders were still in the dark about the scope and impact of homelessness and hunger on their campuses, said Katharine Broton, a researcher and professor studying basic needs insecurity at The University of Iowa. Some college presidents would even insist they didn’t have hungry and homeless students.
“I had people say flat out, ‘I don’t believe it. I think students are lying,” Ms. Broton says.
In 2015, she and her colleagues at The Wisconsin HOPE Lab, a predecessor to The Hope Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published their first survey of basic needs insecurity among community college students. It helped awaken college leaders to the struggles many students were facing.
A decade later, most readily acknowledge that hunger and homelessness are big issues that affect student retention.
But not everyone is convinced that cash-strapped colleges should be responsible for solutions. Skeptics argue that colleges aren’t set up to serve as social service agencies and caution about the costs of “mission creep.”
Pinning improvements in student outcomes on food and housing support programs is tricky; some of the growth seen at colleges like Lorain and Amarillo might be due to other factors. It’s also possible that students who seek help are more motivated or resilient than those who don’t, and thus more likely to persist in college, regardless of the support they receive.
Though some studies have found links between specific interventions and improvements in grades or retention, rigorous research on this topic is rare.
“There’s not a ton of hard evidence on which strategies are most impactful,” said David Thompson, a practitioner-researcher at The Hope Center.
Still, both Ms. Vernon-White and Dr. Lowery-Hart believe that basic needs programs have helped reduce college dropout rates at their schools.
Under Dr. Lowery-Hart’s leadership at Amarillo, from 2014 to 2023, the on-time completion rate nearly doubled, climbing from 15% to 28%. In 2019, the college administration projected a 16-to-1 return on its $300,000 investment in basic needs, counseling, and legal support, driven by higher retention rates and increased revenue.
Making it easier to seek help
But convincing students to use those supports isn’t always easy.
For Luz Martinez, 46, it took hitting rock bottom before she sought help.
It was the winter of 2024, and Ms. Martinez was in her first year in a radiology technician program at Cañada College in Redwood City, California. Her mother had recently died, and she was sleeping in a friend’s living room with her teenage daughter. She knew something had to change.
“My daughter was watching me struggle,” she recalled, tearing up. “I didn’t want her thinking ‘That’s just life.’”
Barely half of students who struggle with food and housing insecurity seek support, according to a recent Hope Center survey. Researchers attribute the low uptake to stigma, limited awareness of available services, and inconvenient hours and locations.
Guilt and shame are also deterrents, according to Allyson Cornett, research director at Trellis Strategies, which studies college populations. Students often say they don’t want to take resources from peers who might need them more, she says.
To normalize help-seeking, colleges like Austin Community College’s Highland campus are creating food pantries that resemble grocery stores, with baskets and check-out lines.
They’re also establishing “basic needs centers” where students can access multiple services in one location, at more convenient times. Some, like Cañada College in California, are placing the support centers mid-campus and encouraging students to stop by.
Ms. Martinez eventually made her way to that center, where a coach helped her apply for a housing scholarship and get her finances in order. She graduated last spring and passed her state licensing exam in the fall.
These days, Ms. Martinez is no longer spiraling down, she says. “I’m spiraling up.”
Poverty at affluent colleges
Basic needs insecurity affects students across all institution types. Still, it’s often hidden at wealthier colleges, where studying and socializing are structured around expensive food and coffee, said Nathan Alleman, co-author of “Starving The Dream: Student Hunger and The Hidden Costs of Campus Affluence.”
Though many schools offer food pantries, they tend to be tucked in a quiet corner of campus, according to Sarah Madsen, assistant professor of higher education at The University of South Alabama and one of the book’s co-authors. That’s partly out of concern for student privacy, Dr. Madsen says, and partly because colleges want to project an image of affluence to prospective students.
Less selective schools are more likely to treat basic needs services as a selling point. At the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, for example, tour guides escort families to the Essential Needs Center, allowing them to see what student care looks like.
“It conveys the moral compass of the college,” says Spencer Moser, assistant dean for student growth and well-being.
Like many campus food banks, the Essential Needs Center was started by students who saw a need among their peers. Students staff the center, managing everything from marketing to food pick-ups.
For manager Kaiya Cocliff, 21, working at the center is a way to develop leadership skills while helping peers.
“When a student walks in and says that they feel seen and appreciated, it makes me feel so good, like I’m doing something for my community,” Ms. Cocliff says.
A tradition of caring for student well-being
The idea that colleges have a moral responsibility to care for the whole student didn’t start with Dr. Lowery-Hart. Jesuit colleges have long been grounded in the values of cura personalis (meaning “care for the whole person” in Latin), says Zachary Reese, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco.
But Dr. Lowery-Hart, who once spent a winter weekend sleeping on the street to experience homelessness firsthand, has helped popularize the idea. With Amarillo, he offered both a guiding, love-centered philosophy and a playbook.
“We created something unique, and it inspired people to think about students differently,” Dr. Lowery-Hart says.
Yet some peers questioned whether his love- and care-centered approach could work at the system level.
As chancellor, Dr. Lowery-Hart has quadrupled the district’s emergency aid budget and ensured that every campus has a food bank. He has hired students as secret shoppers to test campus services and tasked the school’s faculty, staff, and students with designing ways to support students’ basic needs.
Along the way, he’s discovered that leading not just one college, but a college system, comes with more resources – and more bureaucracy.
Dr. Lowery-Hart still hears concerns that colleges can’t afford to meet students’ basic needs, and that it’s not their job to do so. Funding remains a challenge for many programs, with nearly 40% of respondents in a survey of service leaders across almost 350 campuses saying they depend on donations – including staff payroll deductions – to stay afloat.
Tim Cook, president of Clackamas Community College in Oregon, says he’s struggled to get policymakers and philanthropists to take basic needs insecurity seriously. Lawmakers tend to trivialize the problem, he says, and often recall with nostalgia their own college days spent eating ramen, considered a budget meal for struggling students. Donors often prefer to have their name associated with a scholarship or campus building.
So this past summer, Mr. Cook did something to grab their attention: He laced up his running shoes and ran the 1,411 miles connecting his state’s 17 community colleges, chatting with reporters along the way. Three state legislators and a U.S. senator met him on his journey, and one state lawmaker joined for part of the run.
While the grueling journey raised over $175,000 for student basic needs support, it didn’t convince lawmakers to pass a bill that would have provided $800 million for the same kind of support, Mr. Cook laments. In an interview, he says while he’s happy with the attention the run garnered, he’s skeptical that it will lead to lasting change.
But Dr. Lowery-Hart remains optimistic. In the two years since he arrived at Austin Community College, the share of students who stay enrolled between fall and spring semesters has climbed by 23%.
And he’s confident that the caring campus movement will continue to grow, despite its challenges.
After all, “It doesn’t just make moral sense” for colleges to invest in their students’ basic needs, Dr. Lowery-Hart says, “it makes financial sense, too.”
Funding for this story was provided by the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
