An increasing number of college food pantries in Virginia provide emergency rations to hungry students. Photo credit: VCU’s Rampantry
There’s a new wrinkle on the college affordability crisis. Some students are so strapped for cash that colleges are setting up food pantries. As CNN reports, membership in the College and University Food Bank Alliance has quadrupled in the past two years to 398 members.
“Even if you don’t hear about hunger being a problem, there’s probably a population on campus in need,” said Megan Breitenbach, a student who volunteers at the pantry at Montclair State in New Jersey.
Food Bank Alliance members include these Virginia institutions:
Virginia Commonwealth University. The mission of Ram Pantry is to “to provide VCU students with healthy, culturally appropriate, emergency food.” Due to limited resources, the website says, the pantry can no longer service VCU faculty and staff!
Virginia Tech. Tech won reknown for its No. 1 ranking in the “best food” category of “The Princeton Review’s” 2015 best colleges review. But in December 2015, according to the Roanoke Times, the food pantry was serving 50 to 75 students per week.
Old Dominion University. ODU launched Ignite Pantry in October.
Northern Virginia Community College and Eastern Shore Community College also operate food pantries.
Bacon’s bottom line: In their never-ending quest to recruit more elite student bodies, Virginia colleges and universities are placing more emphasis on the kind of food that kids from affluent families are accustomed to. Virginia Tech is a case in point. As I blogged last month when discussing the rising cost of food services at the University of Virginia:
Upgrading from the crappy cafeteria food I ate back in the 1970s to trendy, locally sourced food is expensive, and the lower-income and middle-class students whose families live on McDonalds or Olive Garden budgets are hard-pressed to pay for it.
Little did I realize that the situation was so bad that colleges and universities were setting up food pantries!
With every passing day, it seems increasingly evident that colleges and universities in Virginia (and across the nation) are engines of exploitation, running up the cost of attendance (tuition, fees, room, board), encouraging indebtedness, and sending their graduates into the workforce deeply in hoc — all to acquire the resources to boost institutional prestige in a never-ending race with other institutions doing the same thing. Starving students are the latest symptom of a system that is terribly broken.
