North Shore Community College (NSCC) President Dr. Patricia A. Gentile’s comment during a Tuesday night college forum is shocking and illuminating: “We already knew our students are low income and have struggles, but we didn’t know how bad until the results of this survey came back.”
The survey Gentile referenced was conducted last year and concluded that 70 percent of NSCC students are, according to an NSCC report, “struggling with food and/or housing insecurity.” That statement immediately shatters the stereotypical image of college students frolicking in dorm rooms and living on pizza and beer.
The hunger and housing survey spells out in black and white how NSCC students, including single mothers, veterans, and a spectrum of people who want to better their lot in life and increase their income are trying to stay in school even as they try to make ends meet.
Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, the survey author and key speaker at Tuesday’s Lynn campus forum called the challenge of students living with hunger and potential homelessness even as they try to improve their lives a betrayal of the American Dream.
Goldrick-Rab includes those words in the title of her book tackling the outsized cost of a contemporary college education and the comparative lack of financial aid available to ensure college doors are open to people who want to learn and who want to use knowledge and an academic degree to become better workers and more well-rounded people.
An awareness of student needs prompted the college to conduct the survey. But its findings still shocked administrators and academics like Gentile. The findings included revelations that 33 percent of students said they sometimes go without food and 20 percent do not have a permanent home.
NSCC moved quickly in the survey’s wake to address student needs. Mobile food pantries serve students every month. Administrators have focused on financial aid and student transportation needs to meet concerns raised in the survey.
State legislators, congressional delegation members, even presidential candidates, have extolled the virtues of community colleges and underscored the need to channel more resources into academic and specialized skill institutions serving working people.
But more work needs to be done to make financial aid allocated to community colleges for distribution to students a priority. Financial aid should be viewed as an economic investment of equal importance as bringing a new business to a community or providing job training at the high school level.
Working people attending community colleges juggle time outside work and family responsibilities with the objective of gaining the knowledge and credentials required to get a better job, shift careers or lay the groundwork for additional higher education.
Their commitment and decision to prioritize education immediately makes them valuable participants in the workforce or people who have set their sights on work who deserve strong financial backing.
Hunger and homelessness anywhere in America is intolerable but the nation is dealt a double blow when people who are struggling to find food and housing are denied that opportunity because they cannot harness the power of an education to obtain a decent-paying job.