SNAP and College Students

I began by reviewing the article entitled “Rethinking College Students and SNAP” by Tom Allison, found on the list of current events for this class.  This title really drew me in because people do not understand how difficult college can be when dealing with your own adult life outside of school.  Most young adults are trying to get away from parents and learn to become their own responsible self, but college can be both a learning experience and, also a stress in lives of students everywhere.  You have no time for a steady routine like in high school.  You are trying to work when not at school, sucking up all your hours of daylight, leaving your homework time to interfere with your sleep schedule.  Depending on the major and the coursework, you may spend more time at school than others, leaving you to only be able to work a part time minimum wage job.  To help pay for groceries, many college students turn to SNAP.

This article focuses on the financial deficits in many college students’ lives and the problems they have affording enough food for themselves.  At Spelman College and Morehouse College, students held a hunger strike to change the school policy banning the sharing of any unused meal swipes with another student.  This lasted two weeks before the schools announced a plan to help students who cannot afford proper nutrition for themselves.  The article discusses that nearly 20% of college students are eligible for SNAP, but only 3% of students actually use it.  Students do not seek help for food often because of embarrassment and humiliation, and so many students go hungry because of this.  The article mentioned that these factors can lead to bad grades and even dropping out of school entirely.   The author goes over the two problems with SNAP and college students, which are the application process and the eligibility standards. In my opinion, I believe the largest barrier of college students gaining SNAP benefits is that they must work at least 20 hours a week.  College students sometimes have coursework that will take up nearly every hour of their free time outside of class; taking 20 hours of that week is a large chuck of time for completing necessary assignments.  

I find a great deal of understanding from this article, because I think I was in this position my first two years of college.  Trying to go to school five days a week, do the assigned coursework, study for quizzes and exams, and work part time, was extremely stressful and hard on me.  I was living on my own and scared to ask my parents for help.  I wanted to be able to prove to them that I was able to do this on my own without any help, which I think a lot of college students can relate to.  There were periods where I was eating ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and dinner almost every day.  I would always hear the typical college stereotype that “college students are broke” and I just thought this was a normal part of the college experience.  

I am glad that UIS Volunteer Services (I think) hands out free food to students in need, but campuses everywhere need to have groups like this.  We need nationwide knowledge of the nutritional deficits that college students face and find a way to fix this gap.  Changing eligibility requirements as mentioned in the article is a major obstacle that would be crossed by waiving the hours worked each week for students and supplement their class hours instead.  

Providing SNAP benefits on more generous terms with more accessible eligibility standards would be an easy way to help pay for college education. One of the many nice things about SNAP (speaking a a food producer—I am sometimes a farmer in the summer when not on my 9-month contract as a professor with the university) is the fact that it stimulates the economy by increasing demand for good food products (I can sell more peaches and apples and berries if poor people and college students get SNAP benefits allowing them to purchase my produce).  SNAP and other food benefits are really just another way to subsidize grocery stores, farmers, and industrial food corporations.  We get all the money eventually.  Since just handing money to food producers violates some people’s sense of fairness (we tend to not be poor, and yet there are many very large subsidies for some very wealthy agribusiness corporations), why not give us the money indirectly by giving it to college students, impoverished families with children, and persons who would otherwise be embarrassing us with their gauche tendency of getting sick with malnutrition or starvation in this rich civilization we have built? 

College students are a special population to consider.  Persons who succeed in college tend, on average, to make tens of thousands of dollars more than they would if thy merely took some college, finished an associate degree only, or completed their education with a GED or high school degree.

The 2017 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us:
Median usual weekly earnings of a college graduate: $1,173
Median usual weekly etc. of a person with an associate degree: $836
Median usual etc. of a person with some college and no degree: $774
Median etc. of a person with a high school degree or GED: $712.

So, if we have a policy that costs us, say, $5,000 per college student, and 10% of those students who receive this $5,000 in SNAP benefits complete college because of the SNAP benefits, because with those benefits, they would have given up and settled for “some college” you can see that we're raising the incomes of 10% of the recipients by about $400 per week, or approximately $20,000 per year after they graduate. The government may only directly recover $5,000 of that $20,000 through income taxes and payroll deductions, but there are multiplier effects as well, as the increased earnings of a higher educated population contribute to overall economic prosperity, and if colleges and universities are doing their work right, we should also have many benefits in terms of happier people, better citizens, more creativity, and wiser voters from the increase in educated persons. 

The next question is, does the increase in tax revenue and economic flourishing from that 10% that made it through college because they received $5000 in SNAP benefits pay for 100% of the cost of providing those SNAP benefits to all the poor college students, including the 90% who would have somehow found a way to graduate without the SNAP support?

It depends upon how long people work, I guess.  Let us do a thought experiment.  Assume the SNAP benefits are given to 100 poor college students, at a cost of $1,250 per year for four years, each student is getting $5000 in benefits over four years.  So, over the course of four years while those 100 students are in college, the program costs $500,000.  We imagine that 90 of those students would have graduated anyway, even without SNAP, so the benefit for society is that those students were able to study on full stomachs and not work so many long hours, and perhaps they learned more as a result, or had less emotional stresses, but let us assume we did not increase their earnings.  Only for 10 of those 100 students did the SNAP benefits make the difference, allowing them to graduate and earn $70,000 per year on average over a 30-year post-college-degree working life rather than the $50,000 per year they would have earned on average over a 30-year post-college-drop-out working life.

Let us say that those students earning an extra $20,000 each year pay 14% of that in payroll taxes and 11% of it in federal income taxes, so that we get back 25% of the $20,000 each year, on average.  That's $5,000 per year.  Let us also say that without a college degree, each of those students would have needed about $10,000 in benefits for four years of poverty or near-poverty in their lives when they would have qualified for Medicaid or SNAP or the EITC or something like that, but by getting them a college education, we prevented that.   So, we saved $400,000 in benefits we didn't have to pay out, and we gained $1,500,000 in increased tax revenue (ignoring entirely the multiplier effect).  So, based on those assumptions, we get back $1.9 million in reduced benefits paid out and increased tax revenues.  But, we gave $5,000 to 100 students, so the program cost us $0.5 million.  So, was it worth it?

Wow, it looks like a SNAP benefit to college students that costs us $1,250 per year in SNAP benefits for the students and induces 10% of beneficiaries to graduate from college when they would otherwise drop out with “some college” as their highest attainment is going to reap big returns, approximately $3 to $4 long-term dollars for ever $1 spent on the program.   I wonder if the 10% figure is accurate as an estimate of the facilitation of college degree completion we might get by just offering about $100 per month in SNAP benefits to all poor college students. Anyway, it looks like a good policy in terms of cost effectiveness if the assumption of producing about a 10% increase in graduation rates among poor students holds true.  

Programs don't have to be cost-effective.  Even if the program lost money in the long run, we could justify it on moral grounds in terms of giving people a chance to finish college even if they are poor, so that we can have a society based on meritocracy where talented and hard working persons from poor families have a chance to complete college and compete against the many middle-class and wealthy college students for whom food at college is not an issue.