August 6, 2024

In the collective American imagination, higher education is often seen as something that exists outside of the “real world”—a place where students engage in self-discovery and experiment with new ideas and theories before entering the workforce and focusing on career goals, skills, and pathways. A New York Times opinion column published last year by author and teacher, Jonathan Malesic, captures this romantic and aspirational image of college campuses well, writing, “College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry, or a keen moral imagination may not pay off financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are.” Over the course of my own undergraduate education, I remember a similar sentiment repeated when my friends, family and professors would explain the college experience telling me, “This is the only time in your life when you will have time to think about these issues and ideas.”

This aspiration is admirable. In a society increasingly influenced by corporate visions of work and labor, universities maintaining space outside of that reality seems beneficial for students. Unfortunately, this imagination of higher education as an oasis from a corporate and grinding world outside of campus misses a crucial point: higher education is work. The myth that higher education can be divorced from labor—both the labor that makes higher education possible, and the labor that students must exert when juggling coursework, jobs, and family care—ultimately harms both students and educators. Imagining education and work as somehow unrelated fuels policy choices that cause leaders and lawmakers to overlook harsh realities facing many college students and higher education employees alike. If we begin to realign understandings of higher education to acknowledge the labor inherent to its structure, our leaders will be empowered to make better decisions, and students and faculty will be emboldened to assert their power on campus towards change.

Higher education is a job. Being an undergraduate or graduate student requires labor, just like being an instructor or any other profession. Students spend hours in class and outside of class engaging in complex tasks, writing, lab work, and more. Further, graduate student work often enables the research of faculty and hubs within universities that generate revenue and prestige. The student population is also complex and diverse, and faces the same socioeconomic challenges as those in the labor force. These folks face the same issues that everyone faces: Child care, housing costs, food insecurity, and more. On top of ignoring the vital labor students perform day-to-day, many policymakers assume that most college students can supplement their needs with familial support. Culturally, college students hold a certain posture of privilege; however, this image does not line up with reality. Today, only half of undergraduates report receiving help from parents for housing, tuition, or other expenses. Instead of embracing a holistic understanding of students, perceptions of students as simply enjoying an academic break in preparation for their real career, has led to poor policy and enabled shocking rates of student basic needs insecurity to go unaddressed.

Current federal policy has been shaped out of these assumptions that higher education is not work and that all students have adequate outside support. Policies such as the student rules for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Plan (SNAP)—the nation's primary food assistance benefit program—restricts access to college students. Even if students meet the general qualifications for the SNAP program, they must meet additional eligibility requirements, such as working 20 hours a week, on top of coursework. This rule reflects a failure to correctly understand the situation of students and over-romanticize the college experience, leaving a vulnerable population to fend for itself. The effects of this rule appear in deeply alarming student basic needs data. According to 2020 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), nearly one in four undergraduate students experience food insecurity. Students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) face even higher rates. Students struggle with other expenses such as housing and child care. One in five students parent while in college—and they face substantially higher rates of basic needs insecurity. Parenting students of color face the highest rates of basic needs insecurity. Housing is the most significant cost outside of tuition for students. According to NCES data, 8% or 1.4 million undergraduate students face homelessness. The data also reveals large disparities across racial and gender identity. The Hope Center’s survey collects data on student housing insecurity and found that 48% of survey participants faced housing insecurity. A de facto bargain seems to have been made for students: they must go into debt for tuition and then struggle to house themselves, feed themselves, and take care of their children in order to work every day to educate themselves and participate in opportunities that they are told will pay off in the future.  All this is without sufficient support from their government or their institutions. 

These issues are not exclusive to undergraduate students either. Graduate student work remains a critical function of higher education. Within the ecosystem of the university, graduate researchers and teaching assistants serve as the labor foundation allowing institutions and their full-time faculty time to constantly publish research and maintain academic prestige. Despite this critical role, graduate students face similar struggles with basic needs that undergraduate students face.

Reports such as the UC graduate student survey found food insecurity rates among graduate students in the UC system to be 34.6%, much higher than the national average of 12.8%. Nationally, NCES data from 2020 also found the food insecurity rate for graduate students to be 12.2%, a higher rate than the national average of 10.5% in 2020. Additionally, there is significant evidence this number may have increased given the challenges of the pandemic that followed in 2020 and 2021, and based on the trends from the UC graduate student survey, which saw a nearly 15 point increase from 21% to 35% in rates of food insecurity between 2021 and 2023. 

Ultimately, there exists a deep contradiction between the vital function which graduate students play in the life of a university and the failure to meet all of their basic needs.  The NCES report found that graduate students work an average of 28.5 hours per week on top of their coursework.  Excluding students who did not work and reported 0 hours, graduate students with jobs worked an average of 34.8 hours a week. This means that a significant amount of graduate students nearly work a full-time job on top of their coursework and continue to face challenges meeting their basic needs. 

The Fight for Student Basic Needs Mirrors the Fight for Economic Security

As student labor is fully recognized, what holds increasingly true is that the fight for wages and secure employment is the same as the fight for basic needs. The resurgent movement for worker power across the country has elevated the financial precarity facing much of the labor force, including within higher education. Despite the popular notion that colleges and universities operate as value-driven agents, less tied to hierarchical, rigid and revenue based governance, honest assessments of higher education institutions reveal they often look much more corporate than their reputation may suggest. In fact, they are susceptible to the same forces in the broader economy that place revenue and profit-seeking over the financial well-being of many workers, staff, and in the case of higher education, students, for whom the price of college is increasingly out of reach. Labor conditions at universities are advertised in popular culture as permanent and secure, when in reality the instructional and student workforce—especially the non-white, non-male workforce—is far more likely to be part-time, temporary, adjunct, or contingent. Nearly half of educators are part-time workers, and over three quarters are non-tenure track. Another report from the American Federation of Teachers titled, An Army of Temps: AFT Contingent Faculty Quality of Work/Life Report, outlines more broadly the challenges faced by the contingent workers that make up the majority of the higher education workforce. A few key findings from their survey include that more than a quarter of respondents reported making less than $26,500 annually, and for three out of four respondents employment was only guaranteed one term or semester at a time. They also report that almost half of the respondents put off needed medical healthcare, and over twenty-two percent reported anxiety about accessing food. 

This reflection of poor labor conditions on the basic needs of workers mirrors the struggles that students – undergraduate and graduate alike – face accessing food, physical and mental health supports, housing, and financial security. The labor struggle and the struggle for the basic needs of students should not be separated from one another. Instead, from a policy and cultural perspective, they should be imagined as the same fight. 

Student Basic Needs and Labor Organizing

As student basic needs advocates have long argued in relation to public benefit and safety net eligibility rules, students are doubly penalized. They must effectively work two jobs—the full-time work requirements of a student, and 20 or more hours per week at an additional job. For policy advocates pushing for structural change in Congress, this understanding that being a full-time student is work has been key to building common sense recommendations that remove burdens and encourage student success. This understanding can also help us imagine how the organization of students and faculty plays a role in the higher education basic needs movement just as worker organizing has achieved victories for labor rights and conditions. Over the last several years, labor action has received a heightened level of publicity. Some of the most highly publicized actions, such as the recent UAW, SAG-Aftra and WGA strikes, which secured contracts reflective of record industry profits, should fuel a deeper commitment towards supporting and leveraging power through labor in the basic needs and higher education movement as well. Since the pandemic, efforts from both undergraduate and graduate students to unionize have exploded and are often centered around the ability of students to gain a modest sense of financial and basic needs security.  All of these goals should be seen as vital progress towards and aligned closely with the basic needs movement.   

For students themselves, this fight also means fulfilling the promise of affordable college, and reversing the deep indebtedness that leaves students behind when they do enter the non-higher education labor force. Currently, the total outstanding student debt in the U.S. amounts to $1.727 Trillion, and the average student debt balance is $39,981, with far higher burdens among the exact same communities that face discrimination, low wages, and precarity in the labor market. Black college graduates, on average, owe $7,400 more in student loans than their white counterparts, and over the next four years this disparity nearly triples to $25,000. Further, the ‘equal’ investment which debt-financed education is supposed to represent, does not actually benefit students equally. White families with a college education typically hold a net worth of $400,000, meanwhile Black college-educated families on average have a net worth of $68,000.  

Two things may be true at once: higher education holds the potential to address past injustices and offers new opportunities for those who decide to pursue it, but it also represents a primary driver in reproducing long standing social inequalities. Especially for Black students, who face disproportionate pressure via workplace discrimination and racism to obtain credentials in order to qualify themselves for jobs, this economic burden of student debt is more of a requirement than it is a choice. Ultimately, the core of the student basic needs movement calls us to abandon our ideas about students as temporarily poor, relatively privileged youth who will easily recover from any financial burden they might face. Instead, we must work towards building an economy which values students as humans instead of financial investments. This starts with basic needs such as food and housing, but extends towards fostering working conditions that treat everyone from undergraduates to tenured faculty with dignity. Rather than model this sort of vision, higher education has increasingly credentialized our economy, requiring more and more student debt in order for qualification to work, and, within their own workforce, relied on temporary and under-compensated labor to keep the doors open. In order to achieve the just vision of higher education that student basic needs advocates push for, it will take all the political tools available.

Student and faculty organizing has already demonstrated the power to shift institutional funds, create basic needs coalitions, inaugurate data collection projects, and launch other peripheral action. More importantly, though, a broad recognition of higher education as a place of labor rather than an oasis from it means a reclamation of untapped political power. As complex and industrial as higher education has become, it continues to rely on its diverse body of students, student workers, faculty, and adjunct faculty to create the conditions for learning. This is the most powerful reality for the higher education basic needs movement.