Photo: A sign at The Evergreen State College, Shayna Clayton
by Sheridan Turner
In 2020, any quick visit to social media will show you that college students, almost universally, are broke. We make memes out of skipping meals, our mounting student debt, and living with an excessive number of roommates. Ramen is a symbol of the struggle. And while this arena of internet humor provides an important outlet to manage the financial anxiety of higher education, it arguably exists because of the normalization of student poverty. What we are really memeing about is the widespread inability of students to buy food, pay their rent, and complete their degrees without crippling debt. Why do we think it is normal and okay to have to eat 25 cent noodles for every meal? College students, like any other population, struggle with housing insecurity, food access, and the inability to cover basic expenses. However, it is among the student population that this adversity is expected. Our cultural beliefs around higher education have normalized poverty.
A recent survey of nearly 86,000 college students, conducted by the Hope Center, found that 45 percent of students had been food insecure in the 30 days before completing the survey. Also, 56 percent of students had been housing insecure in the previous year and 17 percent had been homeless. As is to be expected, the survey also found that these statistics worsen among marginalized groups. LGBTQ+ students, older students, students of color, first-generation students, non-citizens, and disabled students all face increased difficulty in meeting their basic needs.
As Evergreen students, most of us are abundantly aware of the economic disparity that exists in our country. With the wealth gap continually widening, we exist in a time where most people struggle to be financially stable. The costs of our expenses—housing, healthcare, tuition, food— are all rising, but wages have not risen to match. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average cost of a four-year degree, adjusting for inflation, doubled between 1989 and 2016, with an annual growth of about 2.6 percent. However, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that wages only had an average annual growth of 0.3 percent in the same time period. Wage growth has not kept pace with inflation and so our purchasing power has decreased despite the fact that we appear to be making more money. It is now a mathematical impossibility to work your way through school, paying both education and living costs, with a mere part-time job, as was previously possible a few generations ago. Are we still operating under the illusion that the majority of college students are receiving financial support from their parents? How else can we explain the expectation that students dedicate four or more years of their life to a full-time workload where they receive no income? While FAFSA has yet to come to this realization, the fantasy of universal family contribution is not a reality. Most students receive no support because most families can’t provide that support. Many students attend college later in life. Higher education has expanded beyond the affluent, white, male population it catered to at conception. The traditional notion of what a college student looks like, both economically and demographically, no longer fits the reality.
While becoming a more and more financially inaccessible title, a bachelor’s degree has simultaneously become a more and more essential qualification for professional opportunity. The Harvard Business School coined the term “degree inflation” in a 2017 report to illustrate the increasing percentage of jobs which require a degree as the minimum qualification. Worse, while your degree may offer you opportunity it is not necessarily a promise of success. Job postings requiring advanced degrees but paying less than a living wage are plentiful. Research from the Economic Policy Institute has shown that wages have largely remained stagnant for college graduates over the past several decades, and that their unemployment rates have risen. And thus, poverty ensues. Perhaps you graduate to mountainous loan payments, or a professional career with measly wages, or maybe the decision to not attend a university for these very reasons positions you to be stigmatized, underpaid, and exploited as a member of the “uneducated” class. Higher education, both vital and impossible, is a financial paradox seemingly only capable of being circumvented through a wealthy family willing to shoulder the bill. The social mobility promised to us as a basic structure of our society is not nearly the guarantee it is portrayed to be.
There is no easy fix. It seems most students these days are hoping, perhaps even banking on the idea that student loan debt will soon be erased. Yet even in the current conditions, we continue. Evergreen students are fortunate to exist in a community more conscientious than most, where resources can be found if you know where to look. The Evergreen State College Satellite Food Bank held on Tuesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action (CCBLA), provides a wide variety of fresh and shelf-stable food completely free to anyone who walks in. In 2019, our satellite distributed more than $100,000 worth of food, provided by the Thurston County Food Bank. We also receive regular donations from the Blue Heron Bakery and the Organic Farm. Zoe Lovato, The Evergreen State College Satellite Food Bank work-study, hopes to soon begin offering recipe demonstrations on campus using ingredients commonly found on our shelves. As the campus food bank coordinator, I encourage students to utilize the food bank regularly to supplement their food supply and alleviate a portion of living expenses, rather than viewing it as an emergency-only resource. Our services can be provided because of the ethic of community care and action that exists in our town and on our campus. I hope, until the foundational causes of poverty can be solved, that we will continue to grow a sense of collective responsibility for the insecurity and distress that many in our community are enduring.
