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The work I’ve done through Jeanne’s Cupboard, UMass Dartmouth’s student-run food pantry, has made one thing overwhelmingly clear: food insecurity among college students is both widespread and deeply misunderstood.
For years, food insecurity research and policy discussions have largely ignored college students. Many assume that if you’re enrolled in higher education, you’re financially secure or backed by parents. But the truth on campuses like mine tells a different story — one of students skipping meals, working multiple jobs, and relying on food pantries to survive while trying to earn a degree.
A study from the National Library of Medicine found that food insecurity affected more than 40% of U.S. college students before the pandemic and 35% afterward. These are not isolated numbers; they reflect a systemic problem — one that exposes how deeply inequities run in our education and welfare systems. Hunger is not a personal failure. It’s a symptom of larger structural neglect.
At UMass Dartmouth, thousands of students rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or on-campus resources like Jeanne’s Cupboard to put food on the table. Yet recent federal cuts to SNAP, enacted through the “Big Beautiful Bill,” have made it even harder for students to qualify. Work requirements have tightened, and eligibility has narrowed — especially for full-time students who already balance academics, employment, and even caregiving.
In the 2024–25 academic year, 1,125 UMass Dartmouth students, about 17% of those who filed a federal student aid (FAFSA), reported receiving SNAP benefits. Those numbers only hint at the full scope of need, since many students don’t know they qualify or are deterred by stigma and complex application processes.
When SNAP falls short, students turn to community-led efforts. Jeanne’s Cupboard now serves nearly 2,000 active users. Our pantry provides nonperishables, frozen meals, produce, and hygiene items — essentials that help students stay nourished enough to learn. But even mutual aid has limits. Pantries like ours can’t replace the safety net our government was designed to provide.
The truth is, hunger on college campuses doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s tied to rising tuition, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, and the relentless pressure placed on low-income and first-generation students to “make it” despite impossible odds. When a student is forced to choose between buying food and paying for textbooks, that’s not a personal budgeting failure — it’s a public policy failure.
Programs like SNAP were created to prevent exactly this kind of deprivation. But over time, our social systems have become more concerned with policing poverty than ending it. Instead of ensuring students can thrive, we make them prove their worthiness to eat.
Massachusetts prides itself on being a leader in education and equity, but we still lack a coordinated statewide approach to college food insecurity. Institutions must do more than acknowledge the problem — they must act. That means integrating food security into student success initiatives, providing clear information about SNAP eligibility, and expanding on-campus support beyond emergency responses.
I’ve seen firsthand how access to food transforms a student’s trajectory. When you’re not hungry, you can show up to class. You can think clearly. You can imagine a future. Hunger, on the other hand, strips away dignity, focus, and hope. It makes higher education a test of endurance instead of opportunity.
My work at Jeanne’s Cupboard has taught me that the opposite of loneliness and depression isn’t happiness — it’s community and possibility. When students, staff, and neighbors come together to make sure no one goes hungry, we build more than a lifeline to food; we build a model of what higher education should be: caring, inclusive, and rooted in justice.
Hunger should never be the price of higher education. And it’s time for food policy, from Washington to New Bedford, to reflect that truth.
Emma Pimentel is the senior manager of Jeanne’s Cupboard, UMass Dartmouth’s student-led food pantry, and an undergraduate researcher studying institutional inequities in food access.
Spend, spend, spend this is crazy and taking federal funding to the extreme. How about making a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they did the trick, and got me through college.
Curious what the price of college tuition was when you were in a student? How much was bread, peanut butter, and jelly?
Add in the cost of housing, gas, and other necessities….then tell us how much the federal minimum wage has increased in the same time.
The cost for both back then were probably a little less, the dollar was probably stronger, but what does that really matter. The point I was making is back then we were taught to work with what we had, to figured out ways to get by, and than if we were still short we would reach out to family. Today everything is free, government assistance is out of control, and the abuse is rampant.
A little less?? I graduated in 2014 and UMass’ tuition has gone up over $10k since then! When did you get a degree? Last year???
You should have gone to BCC and saved on your education.
I thought everyone attending college lived off part-time jobs and ramen noodles?
The problem lyes in the cost of higher education, not food insecurity.
Let banks, not the federal government, regulate who qualifies for student loans and what degrees are worth the expense with regards to ROI.
I worked minimum wage through college and passed with all A’s. I could afford books, tuition, food, and my own car/gas/insurance. It most certainly is a budgeting problem. Also, I didn’t have a DIME given to me. Snap is important for those who truly can not afford it but there zero reason why a woman with a Lou Vuitton bag should be using snap for her LOBSTER. It needs a reform
Have you actually looked at the data of how much people get on SNAP? Do you know the amount of paperwork and time it requires to fill out an application? Have you ever actually seen a woman with a Louis Vuitton bag swipe her EBT card to buy a lobster or is that a caricature you made up? If you did see that woman in real life, how do you know she didn’t just lose a job and wanted to hold onto dignity by keeping her Louis Vuitton bag? Maybe she bought the lobster to celebrate a special occasion – you know data shows that recipients get $6 a day on average with SNAP, right? There are a lot of assumptions being thrown around here, so please back them up with facts so we can glean insight on where your claims are coming from. When did you go to college? How much did rent cost back then?
So glad that worked for you. Clearly from reading this letter, others are less fortunate. Maybe minimum wage was more in line with cost living when you were in college? Maybe housing was cheaper back then? Maybe groceries were too? Maybe, just maybe, other people have a different lived experience than you and there’s a greater benefit to our society if we give them a hand up so they can contribute once they finish college, instead of saying “it worked for me X years ago, so make it work for you today”?
FYI, the average monthly snap benefit for a single person household is $204 or about $6.80 a day. Not sure why people have an issue with feeding the hungry. Matthew 25:35.
People need to stop comparing how it was for them to how it is now – nothing, literally nothing is the same. If you’ve never gone hungry for a sustained amount of time (more than 3 days straight) and at the same time, had to work or take care of others because you don’t have family to reach out to, or you aren’t fortunate enough that your family has money, then please stop.
Don’t say banks need to decide what degrees are ‘worthy’ – that’s subjective, cruel, and privileged. There are systems in our banking that were put there long ago to make it harder for underprivileged people (socioeconomic, race, migrant status) to get monetary assistance and it’s based on bigotry and the capitalistic thought that the person at the top deserves the biggest cut of the spoils. Also: why do we need banks deciding the worth of a degree when it’s what the person DOES with that degree that really determines its worth?
And sure, our government spending IS out of control: with ICE’s budget being blown up by 300% and the president demolishing parts of a historic building that belongs to the People, not him, or bombing places in the Caribbean with no intel causing deaths of hundreds, getting other countries supremely pissed at the US, and costing us more tax-payer dollars to continue his illegal methods of an illegal, brewing war that will cost YOUR money and the lives of OUR people and other countries’ as well.
We should want our populace to be educated; an ignorant populace leads to comments such as those above in dissent, and it doesn’t matter how much formal education they have because clearly they didn’t learn anything from it. Education SHOULD NOT have barriers. Just because YOU struggled with your experience, doesn’t mean others should also have to struggle; you should have compassion for them and want it to be better for them than it was for you. Others are outraged FOR YOU because that’s an awful experience to have. Similarly, just because you DIDN’T struggle doesn’t mean everyone has access to the same resources that you do or did; you should have compassion for them and want it to be just as good for them as it was for you. Why are you somehow more special than the next person? Think about your biases. Sit with the discomfort and face the actual reasons behind having these reactions to saying: Feed the hungry.
It’s devastating that people would rather their money go to illegal warfare and the beating & threatening of their own fellow citizens on the street where they exercise their rights as a citizen in this country (see: ICE soldiers – they are, let’s just call them what they are – threatening peaceful protestors, shooting praying priests with rubber bullets from high range like they’re sniping an enemy, shoving guns in EMTs’ faces for doing their jobs and threatening to shoot them too… I could go on) than going to feed people. The government will take your money anyway. Let it go to something peaceful and productive. So many reliable, reviewed, and repeated studies have shown that less than 1% of people on what we call Welfare benefits are actually abusing them.
You realize the so-called ‘elite’ (and what a NASTY word that is – watch out for who you see using it positively) want people like you to turn on people who need assistance so that you pay less attention to how much money they have and continue to take from you? It’s called inter-class warfare and it’s been machinated by politicians and million/billionaires alike so that we all punch down instead of punching up.
Pick up a book on sociology and educate yourselves since you seem to have had such an easy time of it the first time around.