4 story ideas to help you cover food insecurity among college students

3 weeks ago

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Millions of U.S. college students skip meals and rely on cheap staples such as instant ramen and boxes of macaroni and cheese because they have limited funds for food. A new academic paper estimates that 1 in 4 undergraduate students and 1 in 8 graduate students nationwide struggle with what researchers call “food insecurity” — not having enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.

Not having enough to eat can have serious consequences for college students. Academic studies have found a link between food insecurity and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Research also demonstrates that hungry students often earn lower grades and take longer to graduate. They are more likely to drop out than their well-fed peers.

Students from lower-income families are particularly likely to experience food insecurity, as are those from historically marginalized groups such as racial and sexual minorities, single parents, and students with disabilities, researchers Katharine Broton and Milad Mohebali write in their new paper. They analyzed federal data collected from a nationally representative sample of students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Their findings represent the experiences of more than 7 million undergraduate students and almost 4 million graduate students. Broton and Mohebali note the need for policy changes to address the problem, challenging the notion that college students are expected to skip meals and live on packages of instant ramen because earlier generations had to do that, too.

“Culturally, college has historically marked the transition to adulthood and independence, as traditional-age students enjoyed a robust college life,” they write. “This popular narrative effectively erases the struggles of today’s working-class and poor students, who despite working, still contend with basic needs insecurity.”

Helping journalists cover the issue

We compiled the list of story ideas below to help journalists better understand and examine food insecurity among college students. Two researchers — sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab and registered dietician Beth Racine — pitched in to help.

1. Examine the reasons why college students in your area don’t have enough food.

Academic research indicates a variety of factors cause or contribute to the problem nationally. Here are some of them:

Rising college costs. Over the last three decades, tuition and fees alone have nearly doubled at public universities and private, nonprofit colleges and universities, according to a new analysis from the College Board. Students who pay in-state tuition at public universities and live on-campus will need an average of $30,990 to cover the combined cost of tuition, fees, housing, food, books, transportation and other costs for the 2025-26 academic year. At private, nonprofit colleges and universities, students who live on-campus will need an average of $65,470, the College Board estimates.
Expensive housing. Most students live off campus and commute to community colleges and public universities. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies looks at the nation’s housing affordability crisis in its “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025” report. A key finding: 67% of renters who earned less than $30,000 a year in 2023 spent a full half of their income on rent.
Pell Grants’ declining purchasing power. The federal government gives lower-income college students money to help them pay for higher education. These grants, capped at $7,395 per student for the 2025-26 academic year, have not kept pace with the cost of going to college. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that President Trump signed in July expands the Pell Grant program to cover short-term job-training programs. But students with full-ride scholarships will no longer be eligible for Pell Grants.
More low-income adults attend college. A larger proportion of undergraduates come from lower-income families. Across the U.S., the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants grew from 27% during the 2008-09 academic year to 31% in 2022-23, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Low SNAP participation. Many lower-income students do not receive help from the federal government’s food aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, because they are unaware they qualify or because complex eligibility rules discourage them from applying. About 41% of college students who were potentially eligible for SNAP benefits in 2020 received them, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated last year.
Limited options for inexpensive, healthy meals on campus. College student meal plans typically provide a range of food options. But they can be pricey. For example, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a public university, students paid $3,325 for a meal plan for the fall 2025 semester. Students who don’t have a meal plan pay $10.15 for breakfast, $14.50 for lunch and $16.75 for dinner at the campus dining hall.

2. Explain why campus food pantries aren’t enough.

Across the country, college administrators and student groups have opened food pantries on campus to provide students with meals and snacks. The College and University Food Bank Alliance, which started with 15 schools in 2012, grew quickly as higher education institutions across the country opened food pantries. More than 800 colleges and universities had joined by October 2021, when it was acquired by Swipe Out Hunger, a nonprofit organization that partners with institutions to fight student hunger.

But food pantries are an insufficient way to address food insecurity among college students, says Goldrick-Rab, a leading scholar on food insecurity in higher education. She led the first national study on the topic and founded three nonprofit organizations to tackle the problem, including Believe in Students, which provides students with small grants to cover emergency expenses for such things as food, housing, car repairs and childcare.

Goldrick-Rab points out that college food pantries often don’t provide fresh produce or many other ingredients students need to prepare nutritious meals. Offerings generally tend to be shelf-stable, processed foods such as granola bars, crackers, instant oatmeal, rice, pasta, peanut butter, canned soups and canned meats.

Campus pantries are meant to quell student hunger on an emergency or short-term basis. The lack of variety is one reason many students with long-term needs do not frequent them, she adds. The social stigma associated with receiving food assistance and a lack of awareness about food pantries on campus are two other reasons students don’t use them more, a recent review of research published on the issue finds.

“Why do food pantries have such a strong hold on the minds of higher education administrators?” Goldrick-Rab asks. “They’re telling themselves, ‘I have a food pantry. I did my thing.’”

Academic studies have found that food banks at higher education institutions and elsewhere “are limited in their overall influence on improving food security,” researchers write in a recent review of 33 academic papers published on the topic between 2003 and 2023. Only one of those papers, published in 2021, looks specifically at whether a college-based program changed student levels of food insecurity.

That study focuses on a food distribution program that served students at two campuses of a community college system located in and around Houston, Texas in 2018. Researchers randomly selected 2,000 students from a list of students who were at least 18 years old and had yearly incomes of $25,000 or less. Half the students were invited to select items from a campus food stand while the other half were monitored as the control group.

During the eight-month study, students invited to take food from the food stand were allowed to do it twice a month. At each visit, they could take up to 60 pounds of food, which included both shelf-stable foods and perishable foods such as fruit, vegetables and meat. The program was not deemed a success, however. Only half the students recruited to participate signed up. Those who did sign up continued to experience the same levels of food insecurity, probably because many students did not show up to collect food, the authors of the paper write.

Three of the main reasons why students did not visit the food stand often were a lack of transportation, schedule conflicts and the extended length of time they sometimes had to wait to complete the check-in and check-out process at the food stand.

3. Report on the hurdles that prevent college students from receiving SNAP benefits.

College students can participate in the SNAP program, which researchers find reduces food insecurity, if they meet certain criteria, such as being a single parent, having a physical or mental disability, or working more than 20 hours a week.

A report the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last year estimates that about 3.3 million college students were potentially eligible for SNAP in 2020, but most didn’t sign up. The report emphasizes that only 26% of U.S. college students are “traditional” students, who are financially dependent on their parents and go to college immediately after graduating high school.

In fact, in 2020, 39% of college students were aged 25 or older and 41% worked full-time, the report notes. About a fifth of students cared for a child or other dependent.

In a letter to congressional leaders that is included with the report, Kathy Larin, one of the accountability office’s directors, notes that food insecurity threatens the effectiveness of the federal Pell grant program. Its primary goal is to help lower-income students earn a college degree or vocational certification.

“In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent approximately $31.4 billion dollars on Pell Grants to help over 6 million students with financial need attend college,” Larin writes. “This substantial federal investment in higher education is at risk of not serving its intended purpose if college students drop out because of limited or uncertain access to food.”

Many anti-hunger organizations and student advocates are pushing to change SNAP eligibility rules so more college students qualify. Last summer, federal legislators introduced the Enhance Access To SNAP Act of 2025 in both the U.S. House and Senate.

However, expanding access to SNAP will only help those students who sign up for benefits. Some students do not realize they can participate in SNAP or know how to apply.

When researchers in Missouri surveyed students from nine higher education institutions there, they learned that a significant proportion were unfamiliar with the SNAP program. Almost half the 844 students who completed the survey, conducted during the 2021-22 academic year, reported not having enough food. Meanwhile, two-thirds of participants did not know if they were eligible for SNAP and more than half did not know where to go to enroll.

Goldrick-Rob, along with two researchers from the Urban Food Policy Institute at the City University of New York, outline the main reasons many students don’t seek SNAP benefits in an essay for the American Journal of Public Health. A big one: The guidance offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, can be confusing.

“Even though the rules do allow some full-time students to receive SNAP, they are written in a confusing manner that leads many to mistakenly conclude that students simply are not eligible,” Goldrick-Rob writes with Nicholas Freudenberg, a professor emeritus of public health, and Janet Poppendieck, a professor emerita of sociology, in December 2019.

“The main message sent by the USDA and many intermediaries, including colleges, is that most college students are not eligible for SNAP,” they continue. “A search for ‘college students’ on the USDA Food and Nutrition Service SNAP Web page finds the statement that ‘Most able-bodied students ages 18 through 49 who are enrolled in college or other institutions of higher education at least half time are not eligible for SNAP benefits.’”

4. Investigate college food service operations.

Beth Racine, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies college student nutrition and food choices, encourages journalists to examine local colleges’ food service operations.

“University food environments usually contain two major types of food options: Dining halls and a variety of fast food/quick service shops,” she wrote by email to The Journalist’s Resource. “Dining halls typically have a wide array of healthy food choices — like a salad bar, a variety of healthy proteins, cooked vegetables, fresh fruit, and dairy.”

She points out that some students purchase college meal plans, which generally allow students to eat a certain number of meals in a student dining hall and provide a certain amount of credit that students can use to buy food at other restaurants and shops on campus. However, many students do not buy meal plans, which can be expensive.

“Healthy food access for students not on a meal plan can be a real issue,” Racine wrote. “While those students can purchase food at the university food venues, they may not have much disposable income. This is where (I think) the problem with food insecurity shows up most — among students not on a meal plan.”

A report on meal plan pricing that student loan lender ELFI released earlier this year finds that meal plan costs vary considerably, from $3,000 for two semesters at Oregon State University to $8,640 at the University of Richmond. Across the 150 U.S. colleges and universities that ELFI surveyed, the average cost of the least expensive plan for first-year students is $5,656 for the 2025-26 academic year.

Research demonstrates that meal swipe programs help lower-income students get free meals. These programs, usually launched by student organizations, allow students with meal plans to donate “swipes” on the cards they use to pay for food on campus. Those swipes are then pooled and distributed to students who request them, often by loading the meals onto the students’ school identification cards.

A recent paper that Broton co-wrote with a fellow University of Iowa researcher, Solomon Fenton-Miller, indicates students prefer to get food through a meal swipe program than a campus food pantry. Broton and Fenton-Miller studied how students at a large, unnamed state university used three programs designed to help students meet their basic needs: a food pantry, a meal swipe program, and an emergency aid fund that provided students with one-time grants averaging $500.

They discovered that the meal swipe program was, by far, the most popular.

Some higher education institutions set aside money to provide meal vouchers to lower-income students. When Goldrick-Rab, Broton and Mohebali studied a meal voucher program at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, they discovered that students who used vouchers to eat at the cafeteria or café a few times a week during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years completed more credits and had higher graduation rates than similar students who did not participate in the program.

As you examine colleges’ food service operations, it’s important to ask questions like these to gain a fuller understanding of how students are affected by their campus food environment:

What do meals and meal plans cost at local institutions?
How do college officials determine whether meals are affordable for students?
How does a student’s nutrition and health status change during their time at college?
Do students know how to prepare healthy meals for themselves?
How much money do colleges’ food service operations make and what do they do with it?
Do colleges help students manage the money they have to purchase food?
Do students who commute to campus have access to microwaves and refrigerators?

Racine has learned through conversations with students that the meals they prepare at home could be their healthiest. Many students don’t bring homemade meals with them, though, as they travel from building to building, because common areas frequently lack kitchen facilities for heating and refrigerating food.

In a paper published earlier this year, Racine and several other researchers recommend that cooking equipment and food storage be placed in some buildings to encourage students to bring nutritious meals and snacks from home.