While states have demonstrated leadership in building emergency aid infrastructure, the scale of student basic needs insecurity demands a renewed federal commitment. The Hope Center’s most recent Student Basic Needs Survey found that nearly three in five college students experience some form of food or housing insecurity. Among students who had stopped out of college or were considering doing so, 79% cited basic needs insecurity or financial challenges as the underlying reason.¹

Yet far too few of those who need help can access it. The Pell Grant continues to decline relative to the rising cost of attendance, while public benefits are often too difficult to access. Among students likely eligible for SNAP, two-thirds (67%) report that their household does not receive benefits.² There has been a precipitous decline in federal support for basic needs in the past several years, including the expiration of HEERF. The federal safety net is insufficient, and far too complex, to address students’ short- and long-term needs.

Federal policy choices over the past year have made these challenges substantially worse. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, 2025, enacted sweeping reductions in the food assistance, health care, and student loan programs students depend on most while shifting significant new costs onto already-strained state budgets.³ Several of its provisions will make it markedly harder for students to access the public benefits and financial aid that keep them enrolled: expanded SNAP work requirements paired with a new cost-shift that equates to a substantial portion of their higher education budget.⁴ Meanwhile, the Medicaid program includes a new 80-hour-per-month Medicaid “community engagement” requirement that creates a misalignment between SNAP rules and Medicaid rules for students attending half-time or more. Medicaid also now includes a bi-annual documentation and redetermination process which will create greater burden on students and likely drive a loss of healthcare coverage for the 1-in-8 students who depend on Medicaid.⁵ Finally, new federal loan caps for parents and graduate students, and new provisions that prorate loan amounts by enrollment intensity, are already beginning to restrict access to federal aid for millions of students, including some part-time students who often face the same or higher non-tuition costs as their full-time peers.

In the coming years, students are likely to be pushed further to the breaking point because of these contractions and restrictions in the safety net. And as states are forced to absorb more costs, the case for federal support remains urgent. While state programs offer an important model of how federal emergency aid should function, a renewed federal commitment is needed so that emergency aid functions as part of a coherent safety net that complements other support that students may receive.

The success of HEERF demonstrated that when emergency aid is funded at scale and uses are broadly defined, nearly every institution in the country can stand up an emergency aid program, and students use the funds to stay enrolled. Congress should build on that experience by restoring flexibility to the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) program to function as emergency aid, allowing institutions to withhold a portion of their SEOG allocation each year to disburse as needed for students’ unexpected costs, and by increasing campus-based aid funding (both SEOG and Federal Work-Study) to restore the programs’ reach. Congress should also create a permanent, nationwide grant program for emergency aid, modeled on HEERF, and prioritize funding to institutions serving students most likely to face basic needs insecurity. A permanent federal emergency aid stream could complement or enhance state programs, ensuring that existing programs can reach more students and include a wider range of uses.

Federal policymakers should also invest in systemic, holistic campus supports, by substantially increasing funding for programs like the Basic Needs for Postsecondary Students Program (commonly known as the Basic Needs Grant), currently the only federal program dedicated to comprehensively addressing student basic needs insecurity. Demand among institutions to create and augment existing interventions is high, yet the funding is meager, and subject to the Administration’s priorities and willingness to carry out the Congressional intent of the program. Emergency aid can be included as a key piece of campus basic needs infrastructure within these grants and be delivered alongside efforts to enroll more eligible students in federal, state, or local benefit programming. The program can also be used to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of emergency aid programs in supporting student success.

Finally, the need for emergency aid is also related to the ability of students to have predictable, accurate measurements of the costs they face each term and year. Students’ ability to reliably meet these costs depends on reliable and accurate estimates that are clearly communicated before and during enrollment. Reliable and transparent Cost of Attendance (COA, often known as “sticker prices”) are essential for determining the amount of financial assistance students will need and receive.⁶ Because COA estimates are often opaque and inconsistent—sometimes undercounting living costs in ways that limit need-based aid—students often face unexpected expenses that they would have assumed are covered by Pell Grants, student loans, but cannot be. The U.S. Department of Education should use its legal authority under the Higher Education Act to ensure COA estimates are accurate, transparent, and regularly updated, ensuring students have access to as much financial aid as possible to reduce any unnecessary need for emergency grants when aid runs out.

For more, see The Hope Center’s 2026 Federal Policy Priorities.

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Footnotes

[1] The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs. (2025).

[2] U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2024). Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program: Estimated eligibility and receipt among food insecure college students (GAO-24-107074). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107074

[3] One Big Beautiful Bill Act, H.R. 1, 119th Cong. (2025). https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text

[4] Roberson, E. (2026, July 7). SNAP cuts set to endanger basic needs and state higher education budgets. The Institute for College Access & Success. https://ticas.org/anti-poverty/reconciliation-2025-snap-cost-shift/

[5] U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2025). Higher education: Students' health coverage rates have improved, but barriers to coverage remain for some (GAO-25-107024). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107024

[6] McKibben, B. (2024), How Colleges Set Their Prices: The Need for Federal Oversight of Cost of Attendance in Higher Education, https://hope.temple.edu/policy-advocacy/cost-attendance