We’re asking colleges to do too much

As a broke college student in the mid-1990s, I learned every trick in the book to keep myself fed. I’d wake up at noon every day so I could skip breakfast. I’d get part-time jobs exclusively at restaurants so I could eat for free on the job. On a given day, if a scholarship athlete friend wasn’t using the meal plan the university provided him at restaurants around the city, I’d impersonate him and eat the food he was passing up. (This frequently worked despite the fact I bore no resemblance to a left tackle.)

At no point did I feel like it was the job of government to step in and make sure I was plied with roast beef sandwiches. But that is the recommendation of Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab at Temple University, who complains too many college students are suffering from “food insecurity.”

Writing in The New York Times recently, Goldrick-Rab complains that with the cost of college spiking dramatically, more students are struggling to find money for food, and thus their learning is impaired. Leaning heavily on her own research, Goldrick-Rab concludes that it is “impossible to learn when you’re starving.”

(Goldrick-Rab recently moved to Temple from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she once said the number of similarities between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Adolf Hitler were “terrifying.” Presumably, her contract with her new employer provides her with a daily plate of spaghetti and meatballs to prevent her from saying such uninformed things.)

The idea that a university is in charge of feeding its students fuels a problematic cycle: The more we ask colleges to do for students, the higher tuition gets, and then we ask them to do even more for students who are forced to pay more to go to school.

In fact, the modern university is now asked to be everything to every student. Campuses are set up like full-service county governments, forced to provide a range of human services. Colleges are expected to provide housing and healthcare, oversee their own police forces and run their own judicial systems to either mediate disagreements between students or punish faculty.

And the list of services colleges are expected to provide is growing. Last week, the California Senate passed a bill requiring state universities to provide free “morning after” abortion pills to students; a group of private donors is trying to raise $20 million to set up abortion centers on California campuses. Across the nation, groups are demanding university administrators take new measures to manage racial diversity. UW-Madison students even get free bus passes to go anywhere in town.

Which may lead a lot of parents to throw their hands up and say, “Dude, just teach my kid.”

It makes sense for universities to feed students that are in their care; at most colleges, students in the dorms have meal plans to keep them full.

But the desire to have colleges fulfill every need of every student is pushing their development into adults past their graduation dates.

Asking universities to expand their roles in students’ lives exacerbates the perception of college campuses as bubbles that insulate young adults from the real world. College should be a time when our kids learn to do things for themselves, and that means keeping themselves fed.