Revealing Campus Food Insecurity at Urban, Private, Liberal Arts Universities

ABSTRACT

To address existing and emerging food access needs, three metro private universities in the midwest, with increasingly diverse student bodies representing historically underrepresented backgrounds, utilized a web-based Food Access Survey to collect students’ self-reported experiences (n = 1,478) accessing food and experiencing hunger. The results from this survey highlight those with marginalized identities are at a higher risk for food insecurity. Given increasing enrollment of marginalized students and diversifying student bodies across all institutions, including private universities, we argue higher education needs to recognize, assess, and act on student food insecurity.

KEYWORDS:

• Food insecurity
• private institutions
• college students
• marginalized identities

Acknowledgements

Our research team grew out of a cross campus community-based partnership between three metropolitan universities working to address basic needs and food insecurity on their campuses including all the undergraduate students who advocate for student basic needs. We are grateful to the National Institute for Food and Agriculture for the funding which supported our community engaged work and our campus partners who support students. We would like to acknowledge our research partners Gao Lee, Sam Schmitt, and Marta Shore and our community engaged partners: Valentine Cadieux, An Garagiola, Emma Kiley, Sharon Howel CSJ, Natalie Jacobson, Jennifer Tacheny, Campus Compact, Cross-Campus Food Access Coalition, and Metro Food Justice Network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was partially supported by the “National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFAA) Community Planning Grant: “Urban liberal arts colleges in community food ecosystems: Nourishing underserved students, families, and neighbors.” [GRANT13125681], Proposal No. [2020-07479], DUNS Number [041074209].