Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry | Hacker News Reader

Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry

theatlantic.com

28 pointspaulpauper27 comments

One part of this is that campus dining halls are often pretty expensive - comparable to a mid-tier chain restaurant.

Even most people with professional jobs would consider it too expensive to eat out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday, but we put many college students in a position where that’s basically their only option. At my school, campus dining plans were mandatory for your first year, and I didn’t have access to a real kitchen.

At the same time, it’s difficult for schools to control dining hall costs, because (at least anecdotally) “dining hall food quality” is a surprisingly big factor when high schoolers choose a college.

This is one symptom of a broader phenomenon: college has become a bundled product of courses and a degree + a package of expensive consumption choices, and it’s difficult to get one without the other. Most people early in their careers don’t live in luxury apartments, belong to fancy gyms, or eat out a lot, but living that lifestyle is the default expectation now if you go to a residential college or university in the US.

the fact that american college dorms do not have kitchen is something i find absolutely idiotic.

Why are there no shared kitchens? Most dorm-like university buildings i have seen in my country have shared kitchens for a couple of rooms or an entire floor.

Another thing that's idiotic is that I can't even find ,,kitchen'' mentioned in the article about food on college campus. Without this top comment I wouldn't have understood the real problem. I mean why would I pay another company for breakfast when making an omlette with some vegetables is so easy?

Fire hazards + only takes a few bad actors to ruin a kitchen. There also is there as much of a cooking culture in the US

Fire hazards are not a good enough reason to not have kitchens?

US college students are adults right? Why would they not have any acces to a kitchen because of a possible fire hazard.

In terms of 'bad actors' ruining a kitchen, that seems more like a social problem more then anything else. Breaking a kitchen also seems like a senseless idea, especially in a community of people you live with.

US college students are young adults, 4 months removed from Highschool in most cases. They're also for the most part unsupervised in their dorms. I can recount countless cooking horror stories of dormmates that nearly burned the kitchen down. My personal favorite was cooking dry pasta without water.

Re: bad actors, it isn't just destructive tendencies. It's mostly just being a mess and not doing dishes/ not cleaning up after you're done.

Not teaching children how to cook is a failure of parenting in my opinion. So much useful knowledge about chemistry, thermodynamics, nutrition, small motor skills using knives and whatnot.

My parents made me shop with them, cook with them, clean with them, no reason by age 17 or 18 one wouldn’t be able to handle that themselves. They should have had 8 years of practice already.

I find 2nd generation immigrants in the US have cooking skills passed down from their parents, but most other students I wouldn't trust to boil water.

Or possibly outlets you could plug a hotplate(induction ones don't even get hot...they just heat the metal pan...so not even really a fire hazard unless you just leave it for hours...though they usually have shutdown timers these days....but i mean these are adults we're talking about here...), or a rice cooker or a microwave or an electric kettle into? There's lots of ways to make cheap easy food. I just don't understand you could be in college, have access to electricity and starve....

There are so many ways to cheaply feed yourself, even without a kitchen, that it seems like a self induced problem. If you can't afford the cafeteria food and you have no kitchen...how is the only other option just to starve???

When I went to school the dorms weren't wired for delivering that much amperage to every room. There were strict guidelines against high draw small appliances like hot plates and fridges.

From the information I could find. A single hotplate draws as much power as a straightening iron, a portable heater, a toaster or a coffee maker. A mini fridge draws much less. A slow cooker, also a viable food preparation option, draws less than all of those even.

This varies wildly, i wouldnt make such broad statements. While not everyone might have had their own kitchen, every single dorm building (both legit dorms and “student apartments”) I’ve seen in the US had at least one kitchen in the building. More commonly, it was one per floor or one per 4-5 rooms.

All my dorms did

They don't at least allow small fridges and microwaves? We used to rent the fridges from the dorms? While it's not a stove, you can do quite a bit with a small microwave. I remember eating a lot of sandwiches and fruit. I rarely ate in the dining halls. Mainly dinner and sat morn breakfast.

Having been through dorm life in a decade past, I have to agree, it really is a consumptive experience. Being around a bunch of other 19-and-20-year-olds all day is only insightful in the sense that you get to see how poorly everyone, including yourself, actually tends to function at this age, and without good role models to know what you could do differently.

I find an increasingly strong case to be made for going the community-college-then-transfer route since it brings together a bunch of points that affect most students in some fashion:

* Cost(obviously)

* Transitioning to independent life(less pressure to be a study machine rushing through the degree)

* Indecisiveness about career and motivations(easier, less stressful classes)

Going to a "tough" or "prestigious" school allows you to tell a certain story about yourself, but it usually doesn't lead to well-roundedness, which sets the stage for that common story of a high-achieving student who gets on the perfect parent-approved career track and then abandons it - whether in the middle of the degree, shortly after the first job, or after a few years of work - due to burnout.

The services that dorms and dining halls provide are not luxuries yet, they are what the student has taken for granted throughout childhood. Freshmen entering challenging academic programs have a lot of learning and adapting to do; they do not need to be thrown into the deep end on all fronts at the same time. Moving out in year 2 or 3 after getting used to the general framework and finding some allies is a reasonable system.

Maybe students should learn to live independently before starting full time academic programs, but there is also an opportunity cost to delaying entry to their professional fields.

I suppose it's a good thing: they will memorize more easily

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2063745/

When I was involved in establishing a campus food pantry, I read that ~40% of students experienced “food insecurity”, whatever that means. This adds interesting concrete ness

I think “food insecurity” means not knowing where your next meal is coming from a significant portion of the time.

"Food insecurity" is a textbook example of an underlying problem (hunger & malnutrition) being solved so thoroughly that the goalposts are moved out of the stadium to justify further intervention.

Is that moving goalposts, or just recognizing another problem?

It seems like a problem, so is it a bad thing to solve it once we've (according to you) solved hunger and malnutrition?

I remember numerous times in college going days without food. This is a real problem. Trying to study while also only having water and crackers just drains you of motivations.

Yet Americans wonder why everone else laughs when they proclaim they're the "greatest country in the world".

Yeh, I learned after college that "great country" thing only applies if you're not broke.

It's actually bad that most students can't get SNAP benefits. I think that full time students should be able to get them. Verification is easy enough.

I am not getting any information from this piece except that students need more govt aid.

Our local OSU branch started a pantry for this reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com