(MintPress) — Rising tuition costs and a rough economy are causing many college students to face harsh circumstances in their pursuit of higher education.
Mary Ann Prado, director of resources and referrals at Minneapolis Community and Technical College in Minnesota is tasked with helping students to find food, school supplies and sometimes a place to sleep. “They are not well rested, and they are stressed out,” she told the local paper. “If you haven’t eaten, how are you going to study when your stomach is growling? I have to help find students notebooks and book bags because they cannot afford anything. It is difficult.”
Hunger and homelessness are on the rise amongst college students in the U.S., and elsewhere across the globe students are resorting to some drastic measures, including prostitution, to be able to earn their diploma.
Students strapped for cash face double burden of working while studying
Diego Sepulveda, a 22-year-old political science major at UCLA is the first generation in his blue-collar family to attend college. He transferred to the prestigious university from a community college and says he had always worked while attending school.
Sepulveda, like a growing swath of his peers, depends on wages earned from working while in school to pay his bills and make his dreams of obtaining a diploma a reality.
Sepulveda worked not one but at times two jobs to pay tuition.
“You’re always thinking, ‘How am I going to pay for next quarter? How am I going to get through the rest of the days here at UCLA?’ ” he told NPR.
When he lost his job at a Subway sandwich shop and his housing as a result of it, he was forced to sleep on friends’ sofas or the library. He also took refuge in the Student Activities Center, containing a pool, a locker room and showers.
“I would shower, and it would give me at least some sense of being clean,” he said.
In the fall of 2008, UCLA created an Economic Crisis Response Team, after hearing stories like Sepulveda’s. The goal is to help keep students like Sepulveda who are facing economic hardships in school.
In Minneapolis, a similar scene plays out for Christopher Sparks, a student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC).
Sparks, who is majoring in computer support and administrative network, studies in the library until closing time each night, and then he walks over to Salvation Army where he sleeps each night on a mat on the floor of the organization’s Harbor Light homeless shelter.
“I hate it, but I have to survive,” he said. “I wouldn’t wish this situation on my worst enemy,” Sparks tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“Many MCTC students struggle with hunger and homelessness every day,” says a report on the college’s website. Out of 1,061 students surveyed, 103 said they were currently homeless, and 163 said they frequently could not afford a meal or groceries, according to the campus report.
Calculating the problem
While experts with the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth have said that there has been a marked increase in the number of homeless students nationwide in the U.S, the trend has not been documented with firm numbers.
In 2009, 47,204 college students applying for financial aid checked a box that identified themselves as homeless, Barbara Duffield, policy director of the Washington D.C.-based National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth told the Minneapolis paper. That statistic was not collected in previous years. However, Duffield believes the number may actually be larger, due the survey’s phrasing.
“What we’re hearing from the college presidents and leadership [is] that more and more students are struggling,” Michelle Asha-Cooper, of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington D.C. said.
“Some are taking out pretty large amounts of student loans to finance their education as well as their living costs. Some are enrolling part-time, some are even dropping out.”
In the U.S., the average student graduating from college in 2011 also graduated with a record debt load of more than $25,000, which was caused by rising tuition and the weak economy, CNN Money reported. These factors have driven students to rely more heavily on loans to pay for their college education. And experts say if it weren’t for a significant increase in federal grant aid, the increase in student loan debt could have been even higher, according to the Project on Student Debt.
“Most students in the Class of 2010 started college before the recent economic downturn, but the economy soured while they were still in school, widening the gap between rising college costs and what students and their parents could afford,” a report from the agency stated.
And 2010 graduates suffered an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, an increase from 8.7 percent in 2009 and the highest level on record. However, that is less than half the 20.4 percent unemployment rate for those who don’t get a college degree the Project on Student Debt points out.
Students resort to drastic measures abroad
In Europe, university students who don’t want to graduate with thousands of dollars of debt are increasingly turning to prostitution to pay the bills a survey released earlier this year found.
About 10 percent of British college students said they knew a fellow student who had worked as a prostitute or escort in 2010, up from 4 percent in 2000.
Jodi Dixon, who is studying at the University of Birmingham, conducted the study. She wrote, “With escalating debts, students in the United Kingdom may view prostitution as an easy way to get rich quick,” in the journal Student BMJ, which published the results.
She noted that some students consider prostitution their only choice for paying for their education, “which I think is awful; I think it’s a shame,” Dixon said.
While the act of prostitution is not illegal in the U.K., related activities, including soliciting sex, are.
The English Collective of Prostitutes, an organization offering support for sex workers, confirmed it fielded an increased number of calls from students considering sex work, Dixon noted. The organization points out that it may be due to a waning economy, as jobs in retail stores and bars that students typically work are becoming increasingly scarce and offer low pay.
“What is unacceptable is a student being forced into prostitution out of financial desperation,” Dixon concluded.