Food Insecurity on Campus: How SNAP is a 'Lifeline' for Many Students

Before she applied for food assistance through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Santa Clara University student Kaylee Jensen remembers the anxiety she felt when thinking about how she was going to juggle paying for her rent with affording her next meal — all while studying miles from home.

But when a staff member from her college’s basic needs program helped her apply for CalFresh, California’s version of SNAP, Jensen said, “it was like ‘night and day’ difference.”

“I could eat so much better,” Jensen, now 20, said. As a supplementary program, CalFresh is “not something you can really rely on fully, but it honestly changed so much for me,” she said.

And when it came to finally being able to afford certain kinds of fresh food, CalFresh “really just unlocked a whole new level of eating for me,” Jensen said.

At SCU, a private college, 71% of students come from families in the top 20% of earners. Jensen, a first-generation college student, said she told virtually no one that she was receiving benefits — including her friends.

“SNAP or EBT is almost like a bad word,” she said. “It’s almost an embarrassing part of shame that you’re holding within you … Like, oh, ‘I’m trying to catch up to everyone else, but I can barely afford to live, let alone to eat.’”

While Jensen is no longer using CalFresh, she was one of over 41 million people nationwide who depend on SNAP to put food on the table — a group that’s seen their November benefits delayed due to what is now the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history.

And even as CalFresh recipients in the state have finally begun receiving this month’s benefits after a federal judge’s ruling, and Congress discusses a deal to end the shutdown, President Donald Trump’s administration is now fighting the states in the courts to “undo” this month’s SNAP money — leaving recipients in even more confusion and anxiety.

The shutdown delays have sharply highlighted just how many people in California — around 5.5 million people — rely on SNAP. But among the program’s seniors, families, single parents and veterans, college students like Jensen are a group that’s often overlooked when it comes to depending on CalFresh to eat.

Hunger on campus

Over 400,000 public university and college students participate in CalFresh statewide — a number that surprises people, according to Jennifer Hogg, a senior research manager at the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

“Many people don’t think of college students when they think of who is impacted by the SNAP shut off,” Hogg said. “But today’s college student is largely lower-income — potentially first-generation — and doesn’t have a ton of financial support from home.” And as groceries have become more and more expensive, some colleges are also located in food deserts, making it even harder to find fresh, substantial meals.

Jensen noted it’s common for college students to darkly joke among themselves about how little they’ve eaten that day, as they juggle studies and extracurriculars. But that could normalize the hunger, she said. According to a UCLA study from earlier this year, half of the California college students surveyed said they experienced food insecurity, and 28% of respondents said they’d skipped a meal in the past because they couldn’t afford to eat.

“When you’re having to deal with those things, it’s impossible to think about the larger academic responsibilities that you have,” Jensen said. “I couldn’t focus on anything else.”

The California Policy Lab’s data includes students from the 2022 to 2023 academic school year at California Community Colleges, the University of California and the California State University systems. The data does not include students like Jensen, who attend private schools.

According to the data, over 58,000 CalFresh recipients are within the University of California system, including Berkeley transfer student LisaMarie Fusco, who told KQED she was “broken-hearted” by the SNAP delays.

“I’m devastated,” she said. “People are really tired. We’re done.”

When it comes to juggling the demands of her academic studies with reduced access to school, “I’ll have to bite the bullet and maybe just continue writing and not think about food,” Fusco said.

The November delays in SNAP payments due to the government shutdown are keeping around $56 million from the hundreds of thousands of students on CalFresh this month, according to the California Policy Lab’s estimates.

“It’s just a huge amount of money that we’re talking about — that families and individuals across our state aren’t getting this month, and that isn’t going to support our economy,” Hogg said.

The view from community colleges 

As the government shutdown stretched into October, some college administrators and experts began warning about a possible delay in benefits — and planning for the consequences.

Schools like Chabot College were immediately “trying to brainstorm how to respond …. even before students were receiving letters from the county about their benefits being impacted,” explained Muna Taqi-Eddin, the college’s CalFresh Outreach Specialist.

College campuses quickly deployed resources for students, including expanding existing food pantries on campus and distributing grocery gift cards and fresh food.

Some colleges have also made emergency grants available to affected students. Evergreen Valley College in San Jose secured $100,000 worth of emergency funding for 250 students, according to a college spokesperson. It’s money that the college hopes could help alleviate some pressures facing students, said Sean Dickerson, Evergreen Valley College’s Interim Director of Student Development, Engagement, & Inclusion.

In his role, Dickerson has encountered students who’ve told him they’ve been unable to focus and engage fully in their studies as they miss their November payments, ahead of their upcoming midterm exams.

“It’s just the increase of stress and anxiety,” he said — and students are wondering if they need to decide between “rent or gas or food.”

Like all community colleges, Evergreen Valley is required to provide a basic needs program to help provide resources regarding food, housing and transportation for their students, including those on CalFresh. According to the California Policy Lab, around 276,000 students attending a California community college use CalFresh.

One such student on CalFresh is 61-year-old Salimah Shabazz of Chabot College. Shabazz — known to friends and family as Mrs. Mak — recalled walking into her school’s resource center in tears when learning of the delayed November benefits.

“I suffer from different health problems also. It was in limbo. I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. “Thank God for the student resource hub.”

At the start of the shutdown, the Foundation for California Community Colleges launched a fundraising campaign to assist students during the shutdown and beyond, and “to directly support our students regardless of what happens at the national level,” said Marisela Hernandez, a manager with the foundation.

“The reality is that their financial aid is not enough to cover all of their living expenses in California,” Hernandez said. “Often our students are having to choose between going to class, or going to work, or being able to provide for their families.”

Community organizations step up

UC Berkeley student Fusco said she already relies on the Berkeley Food Network, which operates food pantries and deliveries in the region. And community resources have been a vital lifeline for many CalFresh recipients during an unprecedented moment.

Food banks across the Bay Area have prepared for the expected surges of people visiting their distribution sites, and local restaurants are providing free or discounted meals for impacted residents, with many focusing on families. And continuing a history of food justice in schools, students themselves are collaborating to offer mutual aid.

The Berkeley Student Food Collective is a non-profit “student-governed grocery co-op” located next to the UC Berkeley campus, led by J. Noven, the organization’s executive director. For Noven, the shutdown has highlighted existing problems, from “widespread food insecurity” to a “hollowing out of benefits for students and young people” — but the CalFresh delays were an additional blow to students already struggling to make ends meet.

“Already, we’ve seen a significant downturn in utilization of EBT at the storefront,” Noven said — from students with dwindling or zero CalFresh funds to use.

But despite Noven’s determination to help students and Berkeley residents at this time, the food collective still has its restrictions. A month into the shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told retailers — including grocery stores or corner stores — that providing discounts to EBT cardholders would be considered a “SNAP violation.”

“We are one of a network of individual or independent grocery stores that really want to be stepping up to support communities that use SNAP, and our hands are being tied by the USDA,” they said.

How ‘a lifeline’ can still be out of reach

Jensen, the Santa Clara University student, said she got off CalFresh a few months ago. But her experience led her to study food insecurity at her own institution’s basic needs office, learning more about the cost-of-living in one of the most expensive regions in the country.

“I felt very alone at this school, in my issues,” Jensen said — but in the course of her research, she said she realized, “‘Wow, there’s a lot of students who are dealing with this.’”

In a survey of around 830 SCU students, over a quarter reported “having very low or low food security in 2023.” “It should never be something that anyone’s ashamed of,” Jensen said.

According to the UCLA study, student subpopulations that were most likely to report being food insecure were those who have been in the foster care system, first-generation students and disabled students — disparities that the study’s lead author said showed “food security is also a matter of educational equity.”

In her own studies, Jensen also delved deeper into systemic detriments of going without food as a student: the lower GPAs, the higher rates of anxiety and depression, the disproportionate impacts on first-generation students and people of color.

But for many students, even just getting onto CalFresh is an issue.

According to the UCLA study, over a quarter of food-insecure students who have heard of CalFresh but never used it said they did not know how to apply. Half of them said they hadn’t applied because they didn’t think they’d qualify.

But, in fact, many more students are eligible for CalFresh than are actually using it. According to Hogg’s UC Berkeley research, 1 in 3 UC undergrads qualify for SNAP benefits, as do 1 in 5 community college students.

What’s more, according to 2019 data, “over a quarter of California high school students participated in CalFresh at some point during high school,” said Hogg. But those numbers then drop off after high school graduation — and a major factor is the additional eligibility criteria college students need to meet to stay on CalFresh, Hogg said.

Students need to be either a parent, working for 20 hours a week or participating in work-study to keep receiving food benefits when they get to college. Some students may also lose eligibility for CalFresh if they live with their parents. Overall, “there’s a list of things that students have to do — above and beyond the general population — to be eligible for CalFresh,” Hogg said.

Jensen said that thinking about the back-and-forth court battles still happening over SNAP, and what she called “food benefits being used as a political pawn,” she gets mad. Institutions — the government and colleges alike — need to provide for their students, she said.

“The UN has quite literally delegated food security as a human right,” Jensen said. “And it’s a right that Americans aren’t getting … It’s genuinely a lifeline in an extremely unaffordable country.”

“Now I need to use my voice to speak up for those who can’t, because I was able to not rely on SNAP anymore,” she added. “And that’s something I did hold a lot of pride in myself for — but I also held a lot of pride when I did use SNAP.”

KQED’s Carly Severn contributed to this report.