Despite pouring rain on a chilly November day, more than 1,200 Baylor students and staff lined up outside Moody Library and patiently waited their turn to fill bags with 47,000 pounds of watermelon, grapefruit, eggs, breads, pastries, and other foods. Most left drenched but loaded down with food that would refill empty refrigerators in off-campus apartments and dorm rooms.
What organizers called the Baylor Free Farmers Market was an effort by a working group of Baylor faculty and staff to leverage local resources to address the issue of student hunger on campus and to raise consciousness about the problem to Baylor stakeholders.
Flash forward to Thursday, March 2. Family of Faith Worship Center Pastor Ruben Andrade Jr. ’95 and volunteers from his congregation hosted the Baylor Mobile Food Pantry in the parking lot of the 7th and James Baptist Church. It was a warm, sunny day and the location closer to off-campus apartments attracted more than 500 students. Andrade brought 15,000 pounds of food that was gone long before the scheduled end time of 2 p.m.
Students standing in line spoke of their relief that the Mobile Food Pantry was there. With Spring Break still a few days away, their refrigerators were empty. Their bank accounts were empty.And those with meal plans worried about getting through Spring Break with the dining halls on limited hours.
Andrade said Family of Faith Worship Center supported both the Free Farmers Market and the Mobile Food Pantry as a way to say “thank you” for Baylor students’ year-round service to his parishioners. He says some of his community partners criticized the November event, saying “those rich Baylor kids don’t need it.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” he said, when asked about the number of students in line who seemed well dressed. “Besides the fact that financial aid and jobs may not cover the entire bill, some tell us they have no money left for food after paying rent, that buying produce at local grocery stores is too expensive, and that they can’t work any more hours without impacting their grades.”
“Food Insecurity” is an awkward phrase devised by the federal government to reflect the reality of families that face barriers to having three healthy meals per day, seven days per week. While it’s true that eating badly has always been a part of college life, this issue seems to go much deeper.
National statistics indicate that up to 25 percent of students are food insecure, and the problem is more prevalent at community colleges and four-year public universities. There’s very little data for selective private institutions, possibly because few people think this might be a problem at a place where families choose to pay more than $50,000 per year.
But Baylor professor Nathan Alleman and doctoral student Cara Cliburn Allen, MSED ’15, decided last September to see if that was true.
Alleman and Cliburn Allen identified some potentially vulnerable (at-risk) Baylor undergraduates, sending surveys to 1,500 first-generation college students, international students, fifth-year and transfer students, and students who were eligible for Pell grants.
Alleman and Cliburn Allen received 300 responses to their 1,500 surveys, and about 50 percent expressed some degree of food insecurity. That led them to create the Baylor Food Insecurity Working Group.
“We are now realizing that even students in private universities who have a tight financial margin can’t always spend it on their food budget,” says Alleman, an associate professor of educational leadership whose research focuses on marginal and marginalized populations and institutions. “One of the challenges of emerging adulthood is hunger, and many students are skipping meals or don’t eat healthy as a result.”
Alleman and Cliburn Allen’s survey used six standardized prompts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture asking about their nutrition habits and experiences with hunger. They then interviewed respondents, learning that:
Better financial management is not the only solution to the problem of students skipping meals or not eating healthier.
Students hide their hunger from others. Survey respondents told Alleman and Cliburn Allen that they would tell friends that they were “eating rice all week because they were on a diet” or that they would go on dating websites so someone else would buy them dinner.
Most food-insecure students are hardworking and resourceful. In addition to holding jobs, they’d sign up for weekly emails to help them find meetings or other events that offered free food.
The situation affects sleep habits, stress levels, and classroom performance.
“People generally are incredulous that student hunger is a problem at a place like Baylor. However, when we presented our findings to academic and student-life administrators, they wanted to know the scope of the problem and what can be done about it,” Cliburn Allen says, adding that she thinks Baylor is a “bit ahead of the curve” compared with other private universities. “This is about choices versus not having a choice. We’ve received nothing but support from Baylor for our research.”
Baylor administrators say that they receive referrals from faculty members who are concerned about their students. And two parents that the Baylor Line spoke to on the condition of anonymity said their children have said their roommates are dealing with these issues.
“We’re not going to let a student go hungry,” says Sarah Dorrell Ritter ’03, a caseworker in Baylor’s Student Life area. “I think there is a perception that as a private Christian school, Baylor students can afford the tuition and costs. Most of our freshmen have pretty comprehensive food plans, so the people we need to be focusing on are probably older students without the safety of a food plan and those who may not have family support or may not want to tell their parents.”
Ritter said the students she talks to don’t use the Food Insecurity phrase. “They come in for other issues,” she said. “They can’t concentrate in class, they have 34 cents in their bank account, and they don’t know what to do. This is something we need to be paying attention to because it can be so stigmatizing. It’s a problem that prevents a lot of our students for continuing on in their Baylor careers and being successful.”
Nearly one in four college students have low levels of food security, according to a study of 4,000 students from 26 four-year colleges and eight community colleges that was published in October 2016 by the College and University Food Bank Alliance, the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, the Student Government Resource Center, and Student Public Interest Research Groups.
The situation can make it more difficult to perform in the classroom, with 55 percent reporting that hunger problems caused them to not buy a required book; 53 percent reported missing a class; and 25 percent reported dropping a class.
It’s difficult to track just how many college students are in dire need, but data from the country’s largest emergency food service network suggests that the number is at least in the millions. Feeding America’s 2014 Hunger in America report estimates that 10 percent of its 46.5 million adult clients are students, including about 2 million people who are attending school full-time. Nearly one third of those surveyed reported that they’ve had to choose between paying for food and covering educational expenses at some point in the previous year.
So is there a problem at Baylor?
“The turnout and responses [to the first two events] didn’t surprise me,” said Andrade, who hopes to increase the frequency of the Mobile Food Pantries to one or two a month. “I lived it while I was at Baylor, and I didn’t want to call my parents for help because of all they were sacrificing to send me here. In November in the pouring rain, we saw long lines that never got shorter. Kids were saying they were about to miss class but it was worth it. If you have a meal plan or a full refrigerator, why wait in line?”
Alleman says that their research will expand to include graduate students, adding that there’s no data yet that would tell them whether the influx of community-college transfer students through the Baylor Bound population has exacerbated the problem. But he concedes that it’s a question that will be included along with their research on other “at-risk” populations such as minority populations, which have historically reported higher levels of food insecurity.
And as the university seeks long-term solutions, the staff is committed to helping students address their immediate needs by pointing them toward Financial Aid and providing them with a list of community resources. Ritter also sends out flyers about events like the ones in November and March to students who have self-identified as dealing with food concerns.
“Many of the students who are affected by this feel like they’re all alone, that they’re the only one with these problems,” says Ritter. “There’s no such thing as a ‘traditional Baylor student.’ I tell them I wouldn’t have a job if everyone was typical. I’m always impressed with their resiliency and persistence. For many of them, Baylor is their dream school and they never thought they would be here. But they’re struggling to pay for everything. Their families are sacrificing a lot, and some students can’t have jobs because of degree requirements. But most of them do work, and work as much as they can. Some are taking extra classes to either make up for lost time or to get out faster. We need to figure out how to meet their needs without stigmatizing them. Communicating to them that there are people on campus who want to help is key.”
