A few years ago when a student just disappeared from class, I called her and learned that her car had broken down, her commute to campus from her rural community was over an hour, and she was too worn down and ashamed to keep going in school. The car was just the last straw. I put her in touch with the emergency funds people on our campus, she got the car fixed, and she finished the course. She was far from the only student on my campus worn down by financial precarity as she tried to get her degree.
As in many states, nearly 40% of undergraduates in Minnesota don't have secure access to basic needs: sufficient food, secure housing, reliable transportation, mental and physical health care. Students struggling to pay the rent, keep their car running, and fight off constant health setbacks will also struggle to keep up academically.
The Minnesota state Office of Higher Education has developed a comprehensive blueprint for creating a "basic needs infrastructure" that leverages existing resources, recommends new collaborations and new programs and policies, and specifies exactly what staffing and funding will be needed if students are to be able to study without persistent dread of their next financial crisis. They clarify which supports will need new state statutes and which might be done without additional legislative funding (of course, more state funding is needed).
Obviously, financial aid should cover the costs of living as well as the costs of studying, and that is a long-term goal. In the meantime, caps on grants for campus emergency funds can be raised to reflect rising monthly rents, campuses can work with public transit agencies for subsidized passes for students, nurses might provide health care phone consultations, and staff time might be devoted to steering students to public food assistance programs.
There are 32 separate recommendations. Any state (and perhaps at a different scale, any campus) can do this sort of analysis and planning. The authors report that the report cost $6,336.99 to prepare. That's a minuscule investment within a state budget.
A blueprint is not the building. Much more work and money are needed, but the work of meeting students' basic needs has too often been piecemeal and uncoordinated. A blueprint is a great step for imaging what's possible when we face the big picture.
I think of how shame was one of the reasons that my former student hadn't just called us about her car. I imagine a blueprint like this opening conversation about the many ways that higher ed funding fails students so that the burden is not on low-income students to concede financial defeat, one by one. I imagine publicly acknowledging that faculty and staff and administrators owe it to students to embrace the hard campus and legislative work ahead as we make clear that none of this is about individual student failure but about economic inequalities that make college so much harder for so many students.
