Students hit hard by rent, food costs
California offers sizable aid for college tuition, but total bill too high for many
Sadia Kahn ended up at UC Berkeley because of a look her dad gave her. When she was in middle school, she told him she wanted to go to Berkeley because she’d noticed adults perked up when they heard the word. But in this case it backfired.
“He had the saddest look in his eye,” Kahn recalls. “I think he felt guilty. He knew that was something we couldn’t afford.”
Attending a university in California can be a financial burden beyond the means of many college hopefuls. Rising tuition is compounded by the lack of affordable housing in the state and the high cost of living. That dilemma is the subject of this latest installment of a series on the California Dream, produced by the non-
profit CALMatters in partnership with news organizations around the state.
Kahn took her father’s concern as a challenge. So a few years after his death, Kahn was accepted to UC Berkeley as a junior transfer student. It felt like fate.
Now she could not avoid the question of cost. Tuition often dominates discussions of affordability because it has more than tripled since 1992, according to the University of California and California State University budget offices.
But California is generous when it comes to covering tuition at its public schools.
Like more than half of UC students, Kahn would not have to pay tuition or student fees. UC guarantees those costs will be covered for families making less
than $80,000 — and three out of four CSU students who get aid don’t pay any tuition, according to CSU.
Still, school did not seem affordable for Kahn.
“Oh my God,” she says, “When I started looking into housing, it was just kind of like, OK, I’m definitely not going to school at this rate.”
“What we don’t do a great job of is funding the total cost of attendance, which means the housing, the food, the transportation,” says Lupita Cortez Alcala, director of the California Student Aid Commission.
In a little over a decade, the median rent in California has gone up 44 percent. Over the same period, the maximum financial aid award the state gives lowincome students for nontuition costs has gone up by only 8 percent, according to a recent report from the California Budget & Policy Center.
In terms of federal aid, Pell Grants for low-income students used to cover up to 80 percent of the average cost of going to an in-state public university. Now they cover no more than 30 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Kahn moved into the cheapest place she could find, a room shared with two other women for $615 a month a few blocks from campus. Giving up privacy was hard — even after a couple months she still changed in the bathroom.
But that was a small sacrifice compared to what else she’d left behind in San Bernardino. Her 3-year-old son Hashim was back home with his grandmother. Kahn didn’t have the money to go home to visit regularly, so she video chatted him everyday.
“Hi baby! What are you doing?” she’d say, trying to pry his attention from his favorite show about a
garbage truck and a backhoe. “Hashim, what are you watching?”
To make ends meet, Kahn took out her first loan a month into her first semester. She was trying to get additional financial aid and got on a wait list for student-parent housing. In the meantime, she took out a second loan. She signed up for food stamps, used the food pantry on campus and sometimes a friend would buy her lunch.
Surveys by UC and CSU have found more than 40 percent of students have trouble getting enough quality food to eat.
“Students facing housing and food insecurity are far more likely to experience poor academic health and mental health outcomes,” says Amy Rose, policy analyst at the California Budget & Policy Center. “This really snowballs into them taking part-time classes, dropping courses, skipping semesters,
which just means that they take longer to graduate.”
Kahn ended up dropping two classes — classes she needs for her political science major.
“I was like, what the hell am I doing here?” she says. “Why am I going through all of this? I’m just getting into debt away from my family. I can’t even focus on school.”
Rose’s recent report on nontuition costs recommends increasing funding for low income students’ food and housing.
“What these campuses really need, what the students need, is money.”
Still, the goal has never been to cover 100 percent of low-income students’ costs, says Alcala. “The idea really is to provide a true opportunity for low-income students, first generation students and underrepresented students to seek higher education.”
But what a true opportunity looks like in California in 2018 isn’t always clear.
Alcala’s agency is in the process of conducting a statewide survey of nontuition costs. The commission used to do this survey every three years but hasn’t done one in a decade because of budget cuts during the recession. “The survey will show the results of the need,” Alcala says. “What are we going to do about it?”
Four months into her first semester, things changed for Kahn. An apartment opened up in UC Berkeley’s family student housing, and she is reunited with her Hashim.
And her mom, Koussar, moved up from San Bernardino to help with childcare. She’s adjusting and says Hashim is thriving. Kahn feels a huge sense of relief. “We’re able to go back to a lot of the things that we used to do,” Kahn says. “Like waking up and brushing our teeth together, making breakfast, going out to play.”