New Research Funded by the William T. Grant Foundation Tackles College Hunger
An overwhelming number of college students face the same financial dilemma: pay rent or buy food for dinner. A team of researchers from the University of Houston and Temple University say that food insecurity among college students is forcing a burgeoning inequality in college completion rates.
“Research suggests food insecurity, the lack of availability or access to healthy food, is one of the barriers to graduation for these students,” said Daphne Hernandez, UH assistant professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance (HHP). She and co-principal investigator professor Dan O’Connor, HHP chair, are working with the nation’s leading experts on food insecurity in higher education to evaluate a local intervention in Houston. The effort grows out of a decade of research led by professor Sara Goldrick-Rab of Temple University and her team at the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, the nation’s only translational research laboratory aimed at improving equitable outcomes in postsecondary education. Goldrick-Rab finds that an estimated 56 percent of community college students are food-insecure, even though the majority receive financial aid and are working.
The study, funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and the Kresge Foundation, will track a group of 2,000 low-income mostly Latino and African American Houston Community College (HCC) students, 60 percent of whom leave school within a year of enrolling...