By Catherine Brown, Senior Director of Policy and Advocacy, and Louisa Woodhouse, Policy Associate
Reading time: Four minutes
On Thursday, November 9, 2023, students, college, federal, state and community leaders gathered at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, PA, for a roundtable conversation on how to address food insecurity among college students. The impetus for this event
was a newly released data from a national survey showing that nearly a quarter of college students, or 90,000, in Pennsylvania are food insecure. The event sponsors also released a policy brief showing the estimated number of students at each Pennsylvania college that are food insecure.
The Pittsburgh Promise Executive Director Saleem Ghubril led the discussion and noted the need for federal policy change. “Students are hungry and there’s money that is allocated for them, but
they can’t get their hands on it because the application is so cumbersome and the regulations for qualification are needlessly complex,” he said of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is notoriously difficult to access
for college students.
Food insecurity among college students in Pittsburgh is reaching a crisis point, and this event was aimed at identifying systemic solutions.
Carlow University President Kathy Humphrey, PhD, shared her experience working with students in need. "There is a misnomer that you can tell [when students are hungry],” she said. “You can't tell unless they share it with you…Some students received free
lunch their entire K-12 experience and then we drop them into the postsecondary environment, and we have no idea how to support these students. The pantries are helpful, but the problem is bigger than the pantry.”
“What we were hearing from young people and college students is that they were relying on friends. Many felt like they weren’t deserving of the help they needed because they weren’t working full time. And many are told they aren’t eligible,” said Erin
Kelly, Director of Partner and Program Distribution at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.
CBS News covered the event, which also featured Community College of Alleghany County Southeast Region
President Charlene Newkirk, JD and Venetia Khouri, a graduate student at Duquesne University and Pittsburgh Promise alum. According to Newkirk, "the most impactful experience [I had] was [when] a housekeeper came and knocked on my door with a student
and said, ‘the pantry's closed, he's in trouble, he needs food.’” She underscored the importance of training college staff to develop trusting relationships with students and connecting students in need with resource navigators. It’s critically important
for people in the college to understand how they can help.
Venetia Khouri, a “first gen student in every capacity,” said, “it's deeper than just having a food plan on campus… growing up my mother was eligible for SNAP, but when I got into college it was a whole different ballgame. I applied, but I never got approved
until the pandemic, and after the pandemic ended, I was back off.”
In a letter from US Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), read by her staff, the Congresswoman declared that food insecurity is a, “challenge to basic human dignity…every day we delay, we risk another student falling through the cracks, another dream deferred.
Food is a fundamental right. No student should be forced to prioritize where their next meal comes from over their studies.” State Representative Dan Frankel (D), Mitchel Henderson from Senator John Fetterman’s (D-PA) office, and Jenifer Kiley from
state Senator Jay Costa (D) also attended.
Food insecurity among college students has emerged as a pressing issue across the country. In 2022, Pennsylvania launched Hunger-Free Campus and Hunger-Free Campus+ designations as part of the PA MASLOW initiative to address collegiate basic needs. The HFC initiatives received $1 million in funding in the Pennsylvania FY 2023-24 budget, to support work including efforts to bolster student SNAP access, collect data on campus food insecurity, and participate in a basic needs task force. Louisiana also enacted a Hunger Free Campus Act in 2022, which establishes a hunger-free campus designation and provides competitive funding to support these goals. And the Michigan State Senate recently adopted a resolution urging, “the United States federal government to amend the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to simplify the college student exemptions to make aid more accessible for prospective and enrolled students who come from low-income families.”
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) is a proud member of a national coalition of organizations that includes Benefits Data Trust, Higher Learning Advocates, the Center on Higher Education Policy and Practice, and uAspire working to #LetStudentsEat. We have launched a grassroots effort to encourage federal policymakers to simplify and align SNAP rules for college students so that they are easier for students and college administrators to understand and access.
To advocate for this policy change, we invite you to sign and send this letter to your Member of Congress.
Email to a Friend