The True Costs of College [1st ed.] 9783030538606, 9783030538613

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The True Costs of College Esther C. Kim · Franklin Vernon · Matthew Wolfgram

The True Costs of College

Nancy Kendall · Denise Goerisch · Esther C. Kim · Franklin Vernon · Matthew Wolfgram

The True Costs of College

Nancy Kendall University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI, USA

Denise Goerisch Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI, USA

Esther C. Kim University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Franklin Vernon Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ, USA

Matthew Wolfgram Center for College-Workforce Transitions Madison, WI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-53860-6 ISBN 978-3-030-53861-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research from the WT Grant Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, and the Center for Ethics and Education. Sara Goldrick-Rab was the co-PI for this research project, and her expertise and support allowed for every aspect of this project to unfold. She deserves all the credit for its success. She was not, however, involved in this particular writing project, and so all inaccuracies and opinions are our own. The members of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, particularly Alison Bowman, provided technical, tactical, and emotional support at every stage of the research project. The wonderful and essential work of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab is now occurring at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Social Justice at Temple University. We thank every person who sat down to talk with us for this project, and each of the four institutions that agreed to open their doors to us for two years. They were each welcoming, supportive, and interested in the results of the research. We are grateful for the administrators who wanted to hear about their students’ experiences, and who in some cases implemented policy changes in response. We are particularly grateful to the focal students, who spent a great deal of time, energy, and emotion in helping us understand their daily experiences in college. We hope that we have done justice to their stories and experiences. Chloe O’Gara and Eleni Schirmer provided extensive and essential support as thought partners, in stripping jargon from our writing, and v

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in helping to shape key arguments in the book. Emily Young provided feedback and editorial support, and Sarbani Chakraborty wrangled the citations into order. Tomas, Gabriel, and Cecilia Uribe provided moral support, hugs, patience, and an editorial eye.

Contents

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Introduction Equity and Higher Education Funding for Public Higher Education Calculating Students’ Need Cost of Attendance Expected Family Contribution Piecing Together Affordability in the Current Labor Market Organization of the Book References

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Assumptions About Higher Education and the American Dream College Affordability: Public Perceptions and Current Realities College Students: Public Perceptions and Current Realities Students’ Real Lives: The Consequences of Inequality Inequality and Precarity The Evidence Base and Study Design Conclusion References

1 1 5 6 6 8 9 11 13

17 17 18 20 21 24 27 28

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The True Costs of Academics Introduction The Official Academic Costs of College State Funding and Tuition Tuition Institutional Policies and Class Differentiation The True Costs of Academics Academic Program Costs Academic Fees The “Fee for Services” Model Networking and Professional Development The Costs of Marginalization Managing Hidden Costs Conclusion References

31 31 33 34 36 41 42 42 46 47 54 56 59 61 61

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The True Costs of Living Expenses Introduction The True Costs of Housing Official Policies and Cost Estimates On-Campus Housing Off-Campus Housing Commuting from Home Housing in College: No Good Options The True Costs of Food Official Policies and Cost Estimates The True Costs of On-Campus Meal Plans The True Costs of Off-Campus Food Conclusion References

63 63 66 66 68 72 75 77 77 79 79 86 87 88

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The True Costs of Student Fees Introduction SUF Services How Universities Frame Well-Being The True Costs of Student Centers The True Costs of Student Organizations The True Costs of Recreation Centers

91 91 94 97 99 102 105

CONTENTS

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The True Costs of University Health Services Health Care Emergency Care Counseling Services Conclusion References

107 108 111 113 117 119

Conclusion The Consequences of “Class-Neutral” University Policies and Practices Class-Responsive Policies and Practices Asking Values-Based Questions Tools to Support Institutional Change Participatory Action Research to Support Institutional Change Equity Audits Role Models Role Models in Action Nurturing Public Support for Public Universities References

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Index

124 127 132 134 135 136 139 140 142 145 151

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 4.1

Demographic overview of focal students Characteristics of the four focal universities Estimated tuition and fees, full-time enrolled WI residents, 2014/2015 Estimated academic costs beyond tuition and fees Hidden academic financial costs Traditional versus block meal plans

25 26 37 52 55 81

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Abstract It is increasingly hard to do well in the United States without a college degree. Yet, well-qualified, low-income students are much less likely than their wealthier peers to earn such a degree. Though college holds the promise of fueling socioeconomic mobility, too often in the United States it reproduces socioeconomic inequities instead. This book examines the true costs of attending a public college and the impact of these costs on low- and moderate-income students’ college experiences, academic pathways, and well-being. By deepening our understanding of how college policies and practices result in inequitable student experiences that drive the class gap in college attainment, we aim to generate new policy and political responses that support improved student well-being and equitable outcomes. Keywords College costs · College affordability · Socioeconomic inequality

Equity and Higher Education A college degree has never been more necessary for achieving economic security and improved quality of life in the United States (Baum, Ma, & Payea, 2010; Bloom, Hartley, & Rosovsky, 2006; Carnevale, Rose & Cheah, 2011; Hout, 2012). At the same time, class inequalities (which © The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_1

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in the United States are deeply intertwined with racial, ethnic, geographical, gender, sexual identity, disability, and other inequalities)1 in college access, achievement, and completion have never been greater. In 2012, only 14% of students from the lowest income quartile had earned a bachelor’s degree; in contrast, 29% from the middle two quartiles, and 60% of students from the wealthiest income quartile, achieved that milestone (Bowen & McPherson, 2016). As Rauscher and Elliott III (2014) succinctly state: “In order for education to be an arbiter of intergenerational mobility,... United States policy must address the wide gap in educational attainment among different economic classes” (p. 283). While the effects of higher education on individual mobility and wellbeing have never been greater, a growing body of research indicates that it is becoming harder and harder for lower- and middle-class families to access college opportunities and degrees. The relative gap between lowincome and high-income college students’ enrollment has never been larger (Scott-Clayton, 2015), and greater numbers of academically qualified, low-income students are foregoing college or stopping out (Bowen & McPherson, 2016; Long & Riley, 2007). This gap has increased as low-income families’ costs have increased: families in the bottom 25% of the income distribution now have to pay on average almost 60% of their annual income to send one child to a four-year public university (Radwin, Wine, Siegel, & Bryan, 2013).2 The rising costs of college for families (and particularly low-income families) has been fueled by a number of factors, including rapid declines in public funding for public higher education. Facing radical budget cuts, 1 Class inequalities both intersect and interact with other inequalities to fuel inequitable experiences and outcomes for students. Our focus in this report is on class inequality and the shape and scope of its consequences for students and institutions, but this focus is best understood as one angle of the prism through which socioeconomic inequality is fueled in the United States. In our study, race (particularly Blackness) and gender (particularly femaleness) played particularly outsized roles in shaping the classed inequities and experiences that we describe, as well as in shaping university cultures and students’ lived experiences. For readers interested in delving further into the literature on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s experiences at Primarily White Institutions, we recommend Keels (2020), for readers interested in thinking about current practices shaping Primarily White Institutions’ engagement with students of color we recommend Warikoo (2016) and Jack (2019) (though both focus on private institutions), and for an analysis of the historical roots of anti-Blackness in universities see Wilder (2014). 2 Though their impact has grown exponentially over the last decades, the financial shifts that inequitably burden low-income families are not new (e.g., Walpole, 2003).

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universities often shifted costs onto individual students and families by raising tuition and other costs of attendance (Mettler, 2014). Federal and state financial aid have generally not kept up with increased costs of attendance and the larger number of students who hope to pursue a college degree. As a result, by 2015/2016, the average unmet need for full-time students at a four-year public college was $14,400, but low-income students had the largest amount of unmet financial need (Baum, Ma, Pender & Libasi, 2019). Grant (as opposed to aid) money has been particularly hard-hit: in the 1970s, federal Pell grants covered about 75% of official costs at public, four-year colleges and universities; by 2014, they covered only about 30% of official costs (Goldrick-Rab & Kendall, 2014). State, institutional, and private need-based funding also declined, while merit-based aid—which generally compounds existing social inequities—increased (Doyle, 2010). While costs for higher education shifted from the public onto individual families and students, constant-dollar wages for “private, middleclass wage-earners” in the United States on average declined over the last 45 years by over 11% (Mislinski, 2020). This decline was not equally distributed; like increasing gaps in wealth and homeownership, it was particularly steep for Black workers, and particularly Black women (Wilson & Rodgers III, 2016). Not surprisingly, then, student loan debt for UW System Bachelor’s degree-holders increased rapidly, more than doubling in constant dollars since 1992 to over $30,000 (Kyle & Shastri, 2018), as students increasingly have to reach beyond the resources available to them and their families to finance their college education. The consequences of increased reliance on student debt to fuel collegegoing are again unequal, reflecting racialized and geographical inequities in public subsidies for homeownership, transportation, businesses, and other forms of wealth-creation that have left Black, Indigenous, and Hmong families in Wisconsin facing hurdles in wealth creation that White families on average have not faced.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for Black families in Wisconsin was three to four times higher than for White families, and Latinx and Hmong family poverty rates were more than double the rate for White families (Smeeding & Thornton, 2018). As a result of these historic and continuing systemic inequities, the students in our studies who identified as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color 3 See Ray and Perry (2020) for a brief history of anti-Black discriminatory policies in the United States.

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on average had many fewer familial resources to draw on to support their college-going, which in turn meant that the unexpectedly high true costs of college had a particularly negative impact on their experiences and well-being. This book examines the true costs of attending a public, four-year college, and the impact of these costs on low- and moderate-income4 students’ college experiences, academic pathways, and outcomes. The book aims to shift the way we think about college costs and their relationships to students’ college experiences, thereby deepening our understanding of what drives the class gap in college attainment and outcomes and allowing us to propose better policy responses. More specifically, drawing on research conducted from 2014–2016 with first- and secondyear, low-and moderate-income students at four public, four-year colleges in Wisconsin, the book aims to provide a deeper understanding of how students’ daily experiences interact with college policies and practices to generate growing class differentiation. Our research, like most other studies on this topic, shows that the playing field for college students is not level, even in public universities. But this study does not focus on demographics and degree outcomes. Instead, we start by asking what assumptions people have about how public colleges work and what it will cost (both financially and otherwise) to attend one, and then we explore how these assumptions actually play out in low- and moderate-income students’ college experiences. Focusing on college experiences (as opposed to just student outcomes, or just college policies) allows us to show how college policies, practices, and resources shape students’ day-to-day routines; and in turn, how these routines and experiences produce, reproduce, or transform class inequities among students. In other words, our research shows how class inequities and their consequences for students’ well-being are produced through the interplay between students’ individual backgrounds, abilities, and relationships, and institutional and systemic policies and practices. In demonstrating the barriers that students face as they navigate through their first two years of college, our research documents how widely-held assumptions about low- and moderate-income students’ college experiences are inaccurate and damaging; how students suffer 4 Low- and moderate-income is defined here as families making up to 200% of the US poverty level for a family of four ($51,500 in 2019, and $48,600 in 2016, at the end of the research).

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from the consequences of university, state, and federal policies that benefit wealthier, Whiter, straight, and abled students and marginalize others; and how national systems and practices rooted in racism and capitalism shape university campus cultures and policies, and students’ capacity to survive and thrive in them. As a result, instead of college serving as the great equalizer, it too often destabilizes low- and moderate-income students’ well-being. Funding for Public Higher Education Our research took place at a time when state funding for public colleges was being slashed dramatically across the United States. In Wisconsin, where the research occurred, state funding for public higher education fell by almost 25% between 2008 and 2017 (Mitchell, Leachman, & Saenz, 2019), following deep cuts in the early 2000s. In response, and as was common across the United States, Wisconsin’s public, four-year colleges increased tuition and student fees as state funding declined. For example, according to University of Wisconsin (UW) System annual reports, tuition at UW-Madison, the state’s flagship campus, cost full-time Wisconsin residents on average $6800 in 2000 versus $10,900 in 2013 (in constant 2014 dollars). Even with these tuition jumps, for public universities across the country, higher tuition alone could not make up for the extent of these budget cuts. Forced to find new cost savings, UW colleges increased the number of students they accepted, especially out-of-state students (who pay higher out-of-state tuition), without growing infrastructure or teaching staff; cut student support programs; and adopted marketoriented policies to try to stanch their bleeding budgets. In many cases, as our research will show, those new policies and practices were manageable for wealthy students but destabilizing and even damaging for low-income and otherwise minoritized5 students. While the specifics of the policies 5 We adopt Shaun Harper’s (2012) definition of the term minoritized,“ … to signify the social construction of underrepresentation and subordination in United States social institutions, including colleges and universities. Persons are not born into a minority status nor are they minoritized in every social context (for example, their families, racially homogeneous friendship groups, or places of worship). Instead, they are rendered minorities in particular situations and institutional environments that sustain an overrepresentation of Whiteness” (p. 9). While Harper is speaking about racial minoritization, in this book, we use the term to refer to students who were minoritized on their campus. The groups

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adopted by the UW System and the four campuses where we conducted research were particular to these institutions, as is the particular shape of class, race, gender, and land inequities in Wisconsin, none of what we report is unique—it reflects the broad shape and scope of national higher education ideologies, policies, practices, and systems.

Calculating Students’ Need Before exploring students’ experiences of the costs of college, we briefly describe two aspects of the United States higher education financial aid system that estimate college affordability: Cost of Attendance and Expected Family Contribution. These estimates dominated students’ efforts to save for, select, and survive in college, and they therefore played an important role in students’ experiences of the costs of college. Cost of Attendance Colleges are responsible for providing students with estimates of the Cost of Attendance (COA) in order to help them select an affordable college and plan for their expenses. The COA is governed by federal regulations and represents colleges’ own estimates of the costs that students will pay to attend a year of college. According to the Department of Education, the COA for full-time students is a calculation of the average cost, over two semesters, of: …tuition and fees; on-campus room and board (or a housing and food allowance for off-campus students); and allowances for books, supplies, transportation, loan fees, and, if applicable, dependent care. It can also include other expenses like an allowance for the rental or purchase of a personal computer, costs related to a disability, or costs for eligible studyabroad programs. (U.S. Department of Education, n.d., para. 1)

COA has a powerful impact on students’ college experiences and outcomes because it sets the limits of financial aid resources that students can receive. Estimates never perfectly mirror every student’s costs. But

who most often experienced underrepresentation, subordination, and violence differed to some extent across campus, and included students minoritized in relation to class/wealth, racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and regional identities, as well as by ability and age.

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the COAs provided by the colleges in our study appeared to be consistently underestimated, and this had a very real impact on their college experiences. A swarm of unanticipated costs for classes, housing, food, and health care added up quickly, even for students who accessed all the information available to them and planned around the COA. These findings are not unique to our research. Previous studies have demonstrated that campuses often under- or over-estimate COAs (Kelchen, Goldrick-Rab, & Hosch, 2017; Myers, 2017; Newman, 2014; Supiano, 2014). In our study, all four campuses underestimated the actual cost of attendance. One of the reasons that underestimations were so difficult for low-income students is that federal, state, and many private forms of financial aid (grants, awards, and loans) are based on the published COA of the enrolling university: students cannot receive or borrow more than their college’s COA. A low estimation of the COA therefore means less access to financial aid, no matter what a student’s actual COA. Misestimations of COA are therefore particularly problematic for low-income students because, despite plans and savings, they may find themselves simply unable to access the financial resources they need to continue. Almost one-half of low-income students in this study faced this challenge. Lack of adequate aid and the unanticipated high costs of attendance had many different negative impacts on students’ experiences and outcomes. Several students were unable to pay their college bills (often despite planning and saving for years) and stopped out. Others continued in college, but the extra work hours that they took on to cover unexpected costs affected their grades. Still others took on larger debt to try to make it through, but became more and more worried about whether they would be able to get a job with a high enough salary to pay back their debt and so sometimes changed their majors and career paths in response. One student in our study, for example, changed her major when she realized that she was going to take five years to graduate; her original major, she said, could not support the repayment fees from five years of college. In contrast to low-income students’ experiences with misestimated COAs, the wealthier students with whom we worked found the low COA to be annoying, and maybe even anxiety-producing, but they were not in danger of having to stop out or take on a lot of extra work hours or extra debt to stay in college. The primary costs estimated in the COA can be divided into academic expenses, living expenses, and “other” expenses associated with student well-being and belonging (e.g., health services, recreational services,

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student organizations). In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, we explore each of these cost areas. We examine key assumptions that underlie these costs and their estimates, and then contrast the estimated COA with the actual costs experienced by low- and middle-income students in the study. Lastly, we examine the consequences of these actual costs on students’ well-being and their pathways through the first two years of college. In so doing, we explore some of the “costs” of college that students faced that are not captured by the COA, including physical and mental health, discrimination and segregation, loss of social and familial bonds, sexual assault (reported by 25–55% of all women on the campuses), and food and housing insecurity. Expected Family Contribution Federal government COA policies determine how much financial aid a student can receive from the government to support their college education. Federal policies also shape expectations for family contributions to college costs. Families are expected to support their children’s education to the extent possible. The Expected Family Contribution (EFC) is the federal measurement used to determine how much a family is expected to contribute to their student’s college costs. It is based on parents’ income and resources, as reported on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Financial aid is meant to bridge the gap between the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) and the COA. But EFC and FAFSA are known to be very poor tools for predicting how much families can actually afford to contribute and how much money students actually receive from their family (Goldrick-Rab, 2016; Mathuews, 2018). For example, EFC is calculated based only on family income—it does not include family debt. Yet, in our study and throughout the United States, many low- and moderate-income students’ families had high medical, housing, or business debt. For example, one focal student’s parents had to sell off most of their livestock to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt the family farm was in. While the farm debt did not appear on the FAFSA, the one-time sale of the family’s cattle did. This rendered the student ineligible for financial aid because of the calculated EFC, but the family could not actually support her college-related costs at all. The EFC also has other well-known flaws. For example, complex family politics may impact EFC. For almost half of the focal students in our

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study—and for most of the focal students from divorced families—the EFC overestimated the amount of money that students’ families actually contributed to their education. Students from divorced families regularly faced complications stemming from their wealthier parent (usually a father) claiming their salary on the FAFSA in order to get tax credits, but then not providing any—or very little of—their EFC to the student. Other students found that a parent with whom they did not have close contact would not provide the information needed for the FAFSA. Still others received information from one or both parents irregularly, sometimes making it impossible to file the FAFSA and receive federal financial aid. This appeared to happen more often when parents were divorced or suffered from health problems. In contrast to the situations described above, which all led to overestimations of the EFC, a handful of students—all attending the two more elite campuses at which research was conducted—had EFCs that underestimated their family’s actual contributions to college costs. In both of these cases, a grandparent or other relative provided additional resources to the student, but these resources were not reported on the FAFSA. Between COAs that misestimated actual college costs and financial aid systems that failed to capture their actual ability to pay, low-income students struggled to piece together a viable financial pathway through college. They usually had limited tools to use in building this pathway: small amounts of savings and grants, and larger amounts of work and loans. Their situations were often extremely tenuous—choosing textbooks or rent, going without food at the end of the semester when their points on meal plans ran out, and in the most extreme cases, dropping out of college when faced with one more unexpected fee or medical expense.

Piecing Together Affordability in the Current Labor Market Because the COA and EFC often do a poor job of estimating students’ actual financial needs, and because financial aid in the form of grants has been declining on a per-student basis over the last few decades, low- and moderate-income students often cover college costs by piecing together different funding sources. Financial aid, private loans and credit card debt, and family and friend contributions often play a role. But, increasingly, low- and middle-income students also work to cover college costs.

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In 2017, an estimated 41% of full-time, 4-year college students worked (McFarland et al., 2019); and for decades, the number of students working, and the number of hours they work, has been increasing (Scott-Clayton, 2012). Over these same decades, though, the minimum wage has stagnated and part-time, flex-hour, low-wage positions (in which student workers are overrepresented) have grown rapidly (Carré & Tilly, 2008). While some wealthy students may work these kinds of jobs for their social benefits or for extra spending money, low-income students in our study worked to try to make ends meet and pay their tuition, food, and housing bills. But because the wages that students received as part-time, flex-hour employees were so low (usually no higher than $8.50/hour), and because their wages often fluctuated each week depending on how many hours they were assigned, students from the lowest-income families in our study were usually working 30–40 hours a week across two or three different jobs (often with work schedules that changed each week), while juggling a full-time course load. Research indicates that increasing work hours (especially working more than 20 hours a week) while in college as a full-time student is correlated with declining academic achievement (Darolia, 2014; Goldrick-Rab, 2016; Kalenkoski & Pabilonia, 2010; Perna, 2010), and indeed, we observed how students’ decisions to work more hours in order to make ends meet or avoid more debt often had spiraling, negative consequences on students’ academic performance. Low-income students often felt they had no choice, though: piecing together affordability meant navigating financial aid, credit, and labor market systems that were all stingy, stacked against them, and often left them feeling very vulnerable. While understanding students’ work situations is necessary to understanding their college experiences—because so many low-income students were full-time students and full-time workers—it is also helpful for understanding the broader argument this book is making. Students faced college financing policies that left them unable to attend college without working. But labor policies meant that they could mostly only get lowpay, low-security jobs that could not even guarantee them hours and that almost never related to their school work or major. As unexpected school expenses increased, they had to take on more work hours, which cut into school time and often required a second job. And none of their part-time jobs came with health benefits, so when the more than 1/3 of students in our study got sick over the course of the year in which we worked with them, most suddenly experienced new, high medical debt, even as they

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lost their jobs and had to keep paying tuition, room and board. In this way, systems and policies—inside and outside of their colleges—piled up against low-income students, undermining their well-being from multiple fronts.

Organization of the Book This book is based on data collected through a two-year ethnographic study in which researchers worked closely with a group of low- and moderate-income students (and a smaller group of wealthier students) who were attending four very different four-year college campuses in the University of Wisconsin System. Our goal was to learn about the students’ experiences of college affordability over their first two years of college and the consequences of these experiences on their well-being, college pathways, and academic success. The study was organized around four research questions: 1. What common expenses do low- and moderate-income undergraduates encounter during their first year at college? 2. How do these expenses compare to those estimated by the university and its financial aid offices? 3. How are hidden/unanticipated costs experienced and managed by students from low- and moderate-income families? 4. What are the consequences of these hidden college costs on students’ academic outcomes and personal well-being? We explore these questions over the course of the next five chapters. Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of common assumptions made about who students are, what they should do while in college, and what the outcomes of their college education will be. It then describes the research on which this book is based, and in particular the diverse lowand moderate-income focal students with whom we worked. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe our focal students’ experiences of college costs. We have divided up the chapters to parallel the cost divisions created in the COA. In Chapter 3, we examine academic costs, in Chapter 4 we examine living expenses, and in Chapter 5 we examine student fee expenses. Each chapter describes the colleges’ COA calculations of these costs, students’ actual costs, and the consequences of the higher costs that

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students experienced on their academic progress and their social, physical, and emotional well-being. Students’ experiences of deep financial precarity; of an inability to effectively calculate, plan for, or control the costs of college; of declining academic performance in the face of the escalating pressures of work and debt; and of encounters with college policies and practices that made their path more difficult shape the chapters that follow. If colleges and policymakers aligned their assumptions, policies, and programs more closely with the realities that cause many low-income students to struggle in college, they might be able to make college much more affordable for and supportive of all qualified students. By laying out in detail the costs that low-income students actually incur to attend public college in the United States, this book hopes to serve as a call for federal and state governments, public universities, and state voters to better understand and prioritize the needs and experiences of lowincome students in their decision-making, missions, policies, practices, and budgets. After decades of eviscerating cuts, how can public universities and the policymakers that shape them confront the country’s growing economic, social, and racial inequalities and take a clear-eyed look at how their own practices may be exacerbating them? This is, evidently, no small task, yet our hope is that these brief glimpses into students’ lives will: help disrupt some of the incorrect assumptions that dominate policy prescriptions for public higher education, help public universities rethink their policies and practices, and increase public support for public university funding. Chapter 6, the concluding chapter, reflects on some of the policy implications of the study’s findings and argues that if the United States is to become a more equitable and meritocratic country, colleges are going to have to actively work to create policies and systems: • that decrease, instead of increase, inequality and segregation; • in which the lowest-income students receive the most support to follow their desired academic pathways; and • in which every faculty, staff member, and administrator is aware of and actively working to address the particular constraints and inequities that low-income and other minoritized students experience before and during college.

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The United States public also has a key role to play in organizing to increase public funding for public higher education, and in supporting legislation, policies, and budgets at the local, state, and national levels that reward universities that improve the experiences and outcomes of their most marginalized students.

References Baum, S., Ma, J., & Payea, K. (2010). Education pays 2010: The benefits of higher education for individuals and society. New York, NY: College Board Advocacy & Policy Center. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1. 1.382.6425&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Baum, S., Ma, J., Pender, M., & Libassi, C. J. (2019). Trends in student aid 2019. New York, NY: College Board. https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/ trends-student-aid-2019-full-report.pdf. Bloom, D., Hartley, M., & Rosovsky, H. (2006). Beyond private gain: The public benefits of higher education. In P. G. Altbach & J. Forrest (Eds.), International handbook of higher education (pp. 293–308). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Bowen, W., & McPherson, M. (2016). Lesson plan: An agenda for change in American higher education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Carnevale, A. P., Rose, S. J., & Cheah, B. (2011). The college payoff: Education, occupations, lifetime earnings. Washington, DC: The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed. gov/fulltext/ED524299.pdf. Carré, F., & Tilly, C. (2008). America’s biggest low-wage industry: Continuity and change in retail jobs (Occasional Paper #2009-6). Boston, MA: Center for Social Policy. Darolia, R. (2014). February). Working (and studying) day and night: Heterogeneous effects of working on the academic performance of full-time and part-time students. Economics of Education Review, 38, 38–50. Doyle, W. (2010). Changes in institutional aid, 1992–2003: The evolving role of merit aid. Research in Higher Education, 51(8), 789–810. Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). Paying the price: College costs and the betrayal of the American dream. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goldrick-Rab, S., & Kendall, N. (2014). Redefining college affordability: Securing America’s future with a free two year college option. The Education Optimists. https://www.luminafoundation.org/files/resources/ redefining-college-affordability.pdf.

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Harper, S. (2012). Race without racism: How higher education researchers minimize racist institutional norms. The Review of Higher Education, 36(1), 9–29. Hout, M. (2012). Social and economic returns to college education in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 379–400. Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kalenkoski, C. M., & Pabilonia, S. W. (2010). Parental transfers, student achievement, and the labor supply of college students. Journal of Population Economics, 23, 469–496. Keels, M. (2020). Campus counterspaces: Black and Latinx students’ search for community at Historically White Universities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelchen, R., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Hosch, B. (2017). The costs of college attendance: Examining variation and consistency in institutional living cost allowances. Journal of Higher Education, 88(6), 947–971. Kyle, K., & Shastri, D. (2018, September 24). For 42 lawmakers, UW tuition came cheap: Many oppose new student subsidies today. Post Crescent. https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/2018/09/24/wisconsin-law makers-attended-uw-schools-vastly-lower-tuition-than-today/1216195002/. Long, B. T., & Riley, E. (2007). Financial aid: A broken bridge to college access? Harvard Educational Review, 77 (1), 39–63. Mathuews, K. (2018). Miscalculating need: How the free application for federal student aid misses the mark. College and University, 93(4), 29–32. McFarland, J., Hussar, B., Zhang, J., Wang, X., Wang, K., Hein, S., … Barmer, A. (2019). The condition of education 2019 (NCES 2019144). National Center for Education Statistics. Mettler, S. (2014). Degrees of inequality: How the politics of higher education sabotaged the American Dream . New York, NY: Basic Books. Mislinski, J. (2020, February 13). Five decades of middle-class wages: January 2020 update. Advisor Perspectives. Retrieved February 16, 2020, from https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/02/13/fivedecades-of-middle-class-wages-january-2020-update?utm_source=dshort_ feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=item_link. Mitchell, M., Leachman, M., & Saenz, M. (2019, October 24). State higher education funding cuts have pushed costs to students, worsened inequality. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-higher-edu cation-funding-cuts-have-pushed-costs-to-students. Myers, B. (2017, July 10). How colleges give students a flawed sense of living costs. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/intera ctives/cost-of-living.

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Newman, J. (2014, July 10). Tuition and fees rise, but cost of living—By colleges’ estimate—Falls. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www. chronicle.com/blogs/data/2014/07/10/tuition-and-fees-rise-but-cost-of-liv ing-by-colleges-estimate-falls/. Perna, L. (Ed.). (2010). Understanding the working college student. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Radwin, D., Wine, J., Siegel, P., & Bryan, M. (2013). 2011–12 National postsecondary student aid study (NPSAS:12): Student financial aid estimates for 2011–12 (NCES 2013-165). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013165.pdf. Rauscher, E., & Elliott, W., III. (2014). The effect of wealth inequality on higher education outcomes: A critical review. Sociology Mind, 14, 282–297. Ray, R., & Perry, A. (2020). Why we need reparations for Black Americans. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Scott-Clayton, J. (2012). What explains trends in labor supply among US undergraduates, 1970–2009? (Working Paper No. w17744). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Scott-Clayton, J. (2015). The role of financial aid in promoting college access and success: Research evidence and proposals for reform. Journal of Student Financial Aid, 45(3), 7–22. Smeeding, T., & Thornton, K. (2018). Poverty, incomes, race and ethnicity in Wisconsin and Milwaukee: A supplement to the 2016 Wisconsin poverty report. Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty. Supiano, B. (2014). Forget the rise in tuition and fees, what about living expenses. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/ article/Forget-the-Rise-in-Tuition-and/149649. U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). Cost of attendance. FAFSA. https://fafsa. ed.gov/help/costatt.htm. Walpole, M. (2003). Socioeconomic status and college: How SES affects college experiences and outcomes. The Review of Higher Education, 27 (1), 45–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2003.0044. Warikoo, N. K. (2016). The diversity bargain: And other dilemmas of race, admissions, and meritocracy at elite universities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilder, C. S. (2014). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Wilson, V., & Rodgers, W., III. (2016). Black-White wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

CHAPTER 2

Assumptions About Higher Education and the American Dream

Abstract Public perceptions of college affordability, of college students, and of college experiences are in flux. This reflects both exciting changes in who goes to college and real differences in public, policymakers’, and educational leaders’ understandings of how wealth and social inequality shape people’s college experiences and post-college outcomes. This chapter explores some of the most common assumptions about colleges and (in)equality and then provides an overview of the research on which the book is based. Keywords College affordability · College students · Wealth inequality

College Affordability: Public Perceptions and Current Realities We are writing this book on low- and moderate-income students’ college experiences during a moment of almost incomprehensible wealth inequality in the United States and around the world. Many Americans are well-aware that the playing field for rich and poor kids and families is deeply unfair. The United States public no longer assumes that capable, motivated, low-income students can readily access and benefit from public higher education. In a 2011 Pew survey, for example, 75% of respondents reported that college was too expensive for most families to afford (Taylor © The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_2

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et al., 2011). As noted in Chapter 1, the public’s sense of college affordability reflects the reality of increasing tuition rates and declining public financial support for students. There are, of course, important differences in people’s perceptions of what college is, whether it is affordable, and what kinds of experiences college students should expect to have. For example, while only about 50% of the people surveyed by Pew (Taylor et al., 2011) believed that students and their families should pay the majority of college costs, almost two-thirds of college presidents believed they should—research that might help explain why university policies, and practices appeared to sometimes undermine low- and moderate-income students’ ability to thrive in college.

College Students: Public Perceptions and Current Realities Assumptions about four-year colleges in the United States and the students who attend them are shaped by the outsized access that White, wealthy, men have historically had to higher education (Rudolph, 1990); the gender- and race-segregated history of US higher education; and media representations of college students, which still too often portray college as a playground and rite of passage for middle-class, straight, White, male students (Reynolds, 2014). For example, Donahoo and Yakaboski (2017) used the Internet Movie Database to “identify theatrically released films made in the United States between 1978 and 2015 with plots that included ‘college’ and ‘college student’” (p. 84). Media representations of college tend to: portray more elite universities, populated by overwhelmingly White faculty and students; focus on the social (not academic) aspects of college; and represent college as a place of experimentation and hedonism (Reynolds, 2014) in which students can practice independence while not yet having to take on adult responsibilities (Harris, 2017). It is no wonder then that first-year college students typically view college as a social space and many students with whom we worked had not anticipated the hurdles of scheduling time to study, meeting with faculty, joining relevant on-campus organizations, working, and thinking about future career goals—a more realistic picture of what college looks like for most students today. More importantly, universities are seldom portrayed as sites of serious financial, social, and emotional risks for students, and female, racially minoritized, and less

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wealthy students, faculty, and staff are seldom portrayed at all (Reynolds, 2014; Yakaboski & Donahoo, 2015). Though many no longer believe that college is affordable for all students, there remain stubborn assumptions about who students are and how students should think about the costs of college that, we believe, mask and naturalize the unequal and too-often debilitating hidden costs that low-income students face. For example, there are widespread assumptions and media representations about college as a place of temporary student poverty, on the way to white-collar careers. These assumptions are widespread enough that some studies indicate students describe their own behaviors as responses to these assumptions. For example, students in Harris’ 2017 study claimed that, as college students, they were poor, busy, and needed to eat on the run. They claimed that their unhealthy eating behaviors were associated with their short-term status as a student, and so would not cause long-term damage. Once they “outgrew” their student role, they would also outgrow the poverty and unhealthy habits they had adopted. We often hear that college students should sacrifice by eating instant noodles, saving their pennies, working low-end jobs, and living in tight shared spaces. They should also make new friends, eat on the run, sleep when they can, have new social experiences, make mistakes, and, of course, learn a new field of study. If they do this correctly, they will graduate with the degree they wanted, a lifetime’s worth of memories, and a well-paying job in their field. This image of a college student assumes students are young, full-time students with minimal obligations or responsibilities, few if any disabilities or health limitations, living on campus in a community of intellectual and social experimentation, having fun, studying hard, and making mistakes that have no long-term consequences on their health and well-being. In reality, across the United States: • • • • • • •

40% of students work full time while going to school, 42% are students of color, 46% are first-generation, 49% are financially independent from their parents, 31% come from families below the federal poverty line, 36% face food insecurity, 9% report experiencing homelessness (Lumina Foundation, 2019).

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The student profile described in the Lumina Foundation’s report reflects real and exciting expansions in people’s access to higher education in the United States. But it also implies a college population that has had significantly different life experiences than college students of 70 years ago, and that has significantly different needs. Maintaining our assumptions about who students are, what resources they have at their disposal, what they should be willing to sacrifice to attend college, and what kinds of institutional policies and practices will support their success does a disservice to (and, in fact, can endanger) students who don’t match this unspoken norm for the “right kind” of college student. Examples from our study that are unfortunately applicable to most college campuses across the United States and around the world are that between onequarter and one-half of female-identified students on each of the four campuses reported having been sexually assaulted while at college, and students of color had much greater difficulty accessing financial resources. Colleges are far from safe for many students who don’t match unstated assumptions about who is going to college and what they need. And the consequences of colleges not creating systems and policies that support their actual students cast very long shadows indeed.

Students’ Real Lives: The Consequences of Inequality Common assumptions about college as a carefree time in students’ lives did not align with student experiences in our study. Low-income students’ struggles to stay in college were extensive, serious, and in some cases caused long-lasting, if not permanent, damage. From failing out or not being able to afford their dream major, to deep food insecurity and homelessness, to experiences of sexual assault, to major health emergencies that left them in deep debt, low-income students struggled to survive on campuses that sometimes seemed actively hostile to them and their goals. Students’ struggles in college were shaped by their family and educational histories, which in turn reflected the United States’ extreme wealth inequalities. For example, many of the low-income students in our study came to college having not visited a doctor or dentist in years. They came from high schools that had no advanced math or English classes, which in turn made it virtually impossible for them to pursue certain high-demand majors in college. They came with no bedroom to go back

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to in the Summer, no parent on whom to lean, or with family expectations that school loans would be used to supplement meals for a family struggling to put food on the table each day. Students with whom we worked reported (and we observed) only being able to eat one meal a day, experiencing homelessness during the semester, having to stop out of college before even starting due to unexpected first-year fees, switching out of a desired major because of additional fees, losing close relationships with family members because of financial stresses, struggling to find support to manage the psychological consequences of a sexual assault by a fellow student, and suffering significant physical and financial damage when health crises left them uninsured in emergency rooms. These students experienced life-changing events at college, but these were not the low-risk coming-of-age rites of passage so often assumed in movies and advertisements and public debates about college students. Inequality and Precarity As detailed throughout this book, over the past decades the costs of college have shifted from the public to individual students. These increased costs—both expected and unexpected—often have social, familial, relational, academic, and physical repercussions on students’ lives. Alarmingly, the lives of most of the students in our study became more precarious over the course of their first and second years in college. They were more financially precarious, more socially and emotionally precarious, and in many cases, more physically precarious. This was consistently truer for students with fewer financial resources to draw on, and for women, students of color, and students marginalized by sexual identity or disability. Low-income students’ college experiences cannot be understood outside of an analysis of wealth inequality in the United States. Overall inequality in the United States has been growing since the 1970s.1 Government programs in many cases reinforce existing inequalities, instead of ameliorating them. Though people often assume that government “welfare” funds are mostly used on public services for low-income citizens, in fact the majority of government transfers benefit the wealthy. 1 The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for decades (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.), even as the salaries of the country’s wealthiest CEOs has increased nearly a thousandfold (Mishel & Wolfe, 2019).

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For example, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) estimated that in 2014, the bottom 50% of families in the United States received the same amount in government transfers as the top 10%. These trends have deeply impacted higher education. But they have also shaped students’ pre-college experiences. In 2015, for example, 29 out of 50 states were still providing less public funding for K-12 schools than they were before the 2008 recession (Leachman, Masterson & Figueroa, 2017). Furthermore, as desegregation efforts have been supplanted by market-based “choice” policies, K-12 schools appear to have become more segregated by race and class (Fiel, 2015; Reardon & Owens, 2014), resulting in increasingly different and differentiated pre-college school experiences for students. Public libraries, public recreational services, public food security programs, and many other public welfare programs have been deeply slashed as well (Cooper, 2014). At the same time, laws regulating taxes, labor, housing, transportation, incarceration, and medical services have become more anti-poor (Parrott et al., 2018; Wiehe, Nieves, Greer, & Newville, 2018). As a result, children and families from the bottom income quartile face high rates of food and housing insecurity; poor physical, dental, and mental health; nearly nonexistent public support for childcare; and extremely limited means through which to make ends meet even when working full time (Garcia & Weiss, 2017; Quint et al., 2018). The decline in public funding for public services—including education—has occurred in tandem with and has helped fuel this radical increase in wealth inequality. Current debates about college affordability are occurring at a time when the wealth gap is the largest documented in the last 50 years (Stone, Trisi, Sherman, & Beltran, 2020). The gap has been driven by stagnating lower- and middle-class wages and ballooning debt for these households, which has led to a precipitous decline in the United States middle class (Sullivan, 2019). For wealthy families, in contrast, these have been decades of phenomenal growth: the country’s 25 richest people now control more wealth than the bottom 56% of the United States population (Wiehe et al., 2018), and declining taxation of corporate and individual wealth promises even greater inequality in the years to come. Our research shows how these cuts in public services and shifts in public policies compound the challenges that low-income college students face; and how these experiences of unequal access to basic resources and pre-college opportunities interact with college policies to, in some

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cases, deeply destabilize college students’ health, well-being, and ability to survive college. We can and should celebrate students’ perseverance and strength of purpose, their ability to survive and thrive despite these barriers, their ability to draw on relationships and resources that are never counted in surveys or recognized by bureaucrats. But we should also attempt to clearly represent the barriers that United States systems of education, health, housing, transportation, labor, tax, marriage, wealth, policing, and immigration have erected for some students and not others. These barriers are refracted, and too often reproduced, in students’ college experiences. Expectations about who students are and how they should navigate college have real consequences. They lead to institutional logistics, policies, and practices that privilege certain students and their resources, experiences, and ways of navigating college over others. They produce and reproduce advantage for those who are already advantaged by existing role expectations (Rauscher & Elliott III, 2014). As a result, they too often lead to college policies and practices that work against the well-being of low-income students. While there is a significant body of research and practice that examines racial inequity on campus (and there was previously a robust literature on women’s participation), and policies and programs that more effectively support racially diverse student bodies, there has been less work done to understand how four-year public campuses (re)produce class inequities, and the kinds of policies and programs that can support low-income students successfully (cf Rauscher & Elliott III, 2014). Student experiences and institutional cultures can both only ever be successfully understood as part of broader social, economic, and political systems. This is a daunting analytic task, and one that we do not engage in as fully as we should. Our starting point is an analysis of the consequences of the taken-for-granted middle- and upper-class norms that infuse college logics, policies, and practices. But, of course, these norms are also norms of Whiteness, male-ness, heteronormativity, physical ability, citizenship, and so much more. We hope that throughout the book we will be able to show, through students’ experiences, how class minoritization and other forms of marginalization intersect, interact, and shape the paths that students navigate through college. The accounting of true costs in this volume aims to clearly outline how certain higher education assumptions, policies, and practices fuel inequitable student experiences and outcomes. All of us should care about

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these inequities, because we still expect—and we would argue, need— our higher education system to offer a meritocratic alternative to a ruling class. We look to the public college system to allow smart, hardworking people to get ahead. At a minimum, we certainly don’t expect our colleges to harm students. By laying out the practical consequences of current costs and institutional practices, we hope to provide a toolkit for students and families to consider the true costs they are likely to face in attending college, and for policymakers and institutions to consider how they might revamp policies and practices to serve low-income students better—and thus to nourish educational and social equity.

The Evidence Base and Study Design In this study, four ethnographers, supervised by two principal investigators, examined the costs experienced by a diverse group of 56 lowand moderate-income undergraduates during their second semester of college enrollment (Spring 2015), the subsequent summer, and the start of (or what would have been the start of) their third semester in college (Fall 2016).2 This is a critical time in college, as costs and academic routines have begun to stabilize and students begin to make decisions about continuing, transferring, or stopping out of college. Every attempt was made to recruit a representative group of low- and moderate-income students from each university, in terms of race, gender, academic performance, family economic background, and location of home residence, but these efforts were unevenly successful. Table 2.1 provides a demographic overview of the focal students at each university. Students participated in a wide array of research activities, including multiple, semi-structured interviews covering topics related to their financial, social, emotional, physical, relational, work, and academic experiences in college; their process of selecting and entering college; their financial aid packages and strategies for making college more affordable; and their plans for the future. Focal students were shadowed by the ethnographer for a full day, reviewed their financial aid information with the ethnographer, participated in photo-interview and campus mapping activities, and hosted the ethnographer for a day-long visit over the summer in the location at which they were residing during that time.

2 All student names are pseudonyms.

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Table 2.1 Demographic overview of focal students Focal student information

Robin State University (RSU)

Bobcat University (BU)

Great Lakes University (GLU)a

Galena State University (GSU)

# focal students % Female % Non-Hispanic White % Living on-campus Expected Family Contribution % Pell Grant % with Loans Average amount of loans Net Price paid % working % involved in campus orgs. % in honors program % on academic probation % planning STEM degree % commuting from home % who transferred by end of first year % who stopped out by end of first year

12 67 42

13 77 38

14 64 43

14 78 93

92 $2752

100 $4611

86 b

86 $2850

73 73 $3614

92 50 $5808

86 93 $7846

100 93 $5200

$8676 83 50

$7903 92 54

$11,807 64 43

$11,314 71 36

8 17

0 17

7 0

14 14

17

31

29

43

8

0

14

14

8

0

7

21

8

0

0

14

a One of the fourteen low-income focal students at GLU is an undocumented student and so does

not qualify for any federal grants or loans. This student was accepted at other UW campuses, but those campuses did not grant him in-state tuition even though his family has lived in Wisconsin for over ten years. At GLU, he pays the in-state tuition, in full, every semester. b The EFC is not included in the documents provided to students by the university.

We triangulated students’ accounts of the costs they incurred with (a) observations of students’ financial expenses (e.g., during the student shadowing activity), (b) the official COA provided by each college, and (c) interview data from administrators, faculty, and other university staff involved in working directly with students.

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The research took place at four University of Wisconsin (UW) universities, ranging in size (from approximately 7,000 to 40,000 students), location (from urban to rural), academic focus (from a STEM focus to a liberal arts focus), average net price for low-income students, and demographic composition of the student body (e.g., proportion of in-state students, proportion of female and minoritized students). Details about the four universities are presented in Table 2.2; they represent a broad array of the university types and student bodies that exist in the University of Wisconsin System, or for that matter, many public 4-year colleges across the United States. Table 2.2 Characteristics of the four focal universitiesa

Location Undergraduate Enrollment Operating Budget (US$) % Female % Non-Hispanic White % State Resident % Living On-Campus Cost of Attendance (in-state, rounded to nearest $500) Net Price for Low-Income students (in-state, rounded to nearest $500) Net Price for Moderate-Income students (in-state, rounded to nearest $500) % Pell recipient % Receiving Loans

RSU

BU

GLU

GSU

Small city Over 10,000

Urban Over 20,000

Urban Over 20,000

Under $200 million 60–65% 85–90%

Over $500 million 50–55% 75–80%

Over $500 million 50–55% 65–70%

Rural Under 10,000 Under $200 million 35–40% 90–95%

65–70% 40–45% $19,000

60–65% 25–30% $24,500

85–90% 20–25% $22,500

70–75% 50–55% $18,000

$8,500

$9,000

$12,000

$9,500

$9,500

$10,500

$14,000

$10,500

25–30% 55–60%

15–20% 35–40%

35–40% 60–65%

25–30% 60–65%

Notes 1. Enrollment is for fall 2014 when the study began and COAs are for 2014–2015. 2. Net price, which is COA minus all grants and scholarships, is for 2013–2014 and is for full-time beginning students who live on campus. Low income is < $30,000 per year, and moderate income is $30,000–48,000. a College names are pseudonyms, and numbers are rounded to protect university confidentiality.

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This kind of ethnographic research3 provides an up-close look at how students respond to the college costs that they encounter and allows for close observation of the evolving consequences of these responses for students’ personal and academic well-being. As part of this ethnographic study, the researchers also systematically collected data through interviews with faculty, staff, other students, and alumni; conducted observations of academic and social spaces on campuses; and collected and analyzed pertinent documents (e.g., campus brochures, student organization agendas, etc.). In the following chapters, we focus on student costs and experiences that were common across most of the campuses and most focal students. Since the campuses and focal students are extremely diverse, common patterns point to policies, processes, and practices that are widespread. When describing “universities’,” “most universities’,” “students’,” or “most students’” experiences, we are referring to experiences that were documented across at least three of the four universities at which we conducted research, or at least 61% of students. When we use the term “some,” we refer to less than 60% but more than 30% of all students, or two of four campuses. When a specific example of a student experience or an institutional practice is provided, we indicate the university from which it came, but unless we note that a particular experience was only evident at one or a few campuses, the example is illustrative of patterns observed across the majority of campuses.

Conclusion In this period of extreme wealth inequality, people’s perceptions of college affordability and college students and their experiences are in flux. On the one hand, older perceptions of who should go to college and what a college degree will mean for people’s lives are fading. As more and more people enter college, stories about their experiences and outcomes are changing our public narratives. New kinds of research, for example 3 Ethnographic research refers here to a type of qualitative methodology that most often draws on anthropological or sociological approaches to understanding the world, and that attempts to learn about the sociocultural relations that shape human interactions. Ethnographic research is commonly marked by the researcher’s long-term engagement with people, a place, or a sociocultural process or unit; qualitative methods such as semistructured participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and group discussions; and a focus on researcher reflexivity and positionality.

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on college student food and housing insecurity, also generate new understandings about what it means to be a student. Social media platforms have allowed for new communities and narratives to arise as well. On the other hand, these new stories and perceptions are layered over old ones: assumptions that college is for rich White kids, that college students are having “the time of their lives,” that college will only have beneficial, long-lasting effects, and that students therefore can and should take on debt and work to finance their education all play out in our debates about, and public support for, public higher education. This research was designed to cut through some of these perceptions and rhetoric, to try to carefully examine how low- and moderate-income students experience the first two years of college at four very different, four-year universities in Wisconsin. In so doing, we hope to form a deeper understanding of how students’ histories and college experiences are influenced by the logics, policies, and practices that shape their universities, and state and federal funding for higher education. Such an understanding would help us do at least three things: 1. Account, much more realistically, for the costs (both financial costs and social, emotional, and relational costs) that low- and moderateincome students actually pay to attend college, 2. Provide an evidence base to think about how we should value and account for students’ college experiences, not just their college outcomes, and 3. Begin wrestling with the bigger question of what kinds of policy, practice, and budgetary reforms are needed to put marginalized students’ experiences and needs at the center of our public university’s mandates.

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Stone, C., Trisi, D., Sherman, A., & Beltran, J. (2020, January 13). A guide to statistics on historical trends in income inequality. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-andinequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality. Sullivan, J. (February 2019). Better state budget, policy decisions can improve health. Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/better-state-bud get-policy-decisions-can-improve-health. Taylor, P., Parker, K., Fry, R., Cohn, D., Wang, W., Velasco, G., & Dockterman, D. (2011, May 16). Is college worth it? Washington, DC: Pew Social and Demographic Trends. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/ uploads/sites/3/2011/05/higher-ed-report.pdf. U.S. Department of Labor. (n.d.). Minimum wage. Retrieved February 18, 2020, from https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage. Wiehe, M., Nieves, E., Greer, J., & Newville, D. (October 2018). Race, wealth, and taxes. Washington, DC: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Prosperity Now. https://prosperitynow.org/sites/default/files/resources/ ITEP-Prosperity_Now-Race_Wealth_and_Taxes-FULL%20REPORT-FINAL_ 5.pdf. Accessed January 19, 2020. Yakaboski, T., & Donahoo, S. (2015). Hollywood’s representations of college women and the implications for housing and residence life professionals. Journal of College & University Student Housing, 41(2), 44–61.

CHAPTER 3

The True Costs of Academics

Abstract This chapter describes the history of state higher education funding, its impacts on tuition and fees, and the official academic costs that students expected to pay to attend college. The chapter then examines the hidden financial costs the students paid related to fees, programs and majors, textbooks and supplies, and professional development and networking; and the hidden social, emotional, and relational costs minoritized students faced inside and outside of the classroom. It closes by outlining how students responded to these hidden costs and the consequences for their academic pathways and well-being. Keywords Tuition · Academic fees · Fee-for-service · Campus climate

Introduction This chapter examines the true costs of college academics experienced by students in our study. Students reported (and we observed) that the money they had to pay to participate in their desired academic pathways was, generally, much higher than they expected and higher than the COA. The reasons for this were threefold. First, most campuses underestimated the costs of course materials, academic supplies, and the increasing number of extra fees associated with a wide range of classes (e.g., on-line courses, music classes). Second, many low-income students had to enroll © The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_3

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in developmental courses designed to strengthen their math or writing skills before they could pursue the courses they needed for their desired majors—but the developmental courses cost extra time and money for which students had not budgeted. And third, while many students in the study were initially interested in academic pathways that had competitive admission (e.g., engineering, nursing), they often learned that gaining admission to these majors would carry additional costs that were unaccounted for in the COA and felt overwhelming to some students. Some of these costs were direct fees, like differentiated tuition for engineering programs. Others had insurmountable financial implications caused by unspoken expectations that students would put additional time and resources into accessing the major (e.g., unspoken nursing admissions committee assumptions that students would have completed volunteer work, founded a student organization, or played a leadership role in a professional organization). These costs acted as unacknowledged systemlevel barriers for low-income students’ admission to or participation in high-demand majors. Low- and moderate-income students—and particularly students also minoritized by race or ethnicity—experienced barriers to their academic dreams and incurred high socio-emotional costs as they navigated through college including specific programs, competitive classes, and student advising. They were often left feeling that their relationship to these various resources was inequitable, irrelevant, or inappropriate; and at times even violent, harmful, and made them feel abjected by their peers and the university.1 For public universities, the inequities that result from unexpected academic costs, including the hidden fees for accessing desired majors and the socio-emotional costs borne by students marginalized from academic spaces and experiences by racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism, should be a major concern. They translate into long-term inequities in students’ access to different fields of study, and the wages and salaries that follow; and also the loss of creativity, innovation, and new knowledge 1 We draw here on James Ferguson’s notion of abjection as the feeling of being “thrown aside, expelled or discarded” (1999, p. 236). Ferguson is speaking about workers’ feelings of abjection when the capitalist relations in which they worked come apart and their livelihoods and economic value disappear; this sense of a system in which one is not valued—a system both made up of but also larger than one’s daily interactions with others—mirrored students’ feelings of the university’s lack of care for their experiences or treatment at the hands of majoritarian campus members.

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generation in key fields for human well-being (Gewin, 2018; Østergaard, Timmermans, & Kristinsson, 2011), brought about by a lack of student diversity in career pipelines. This chapter first examines universities’ official COA for academic costs (“tuition and fees”), explaining why and how the official academic COA has increased over the last decade in UW campuses. It then compares the official COA to students’ experiences of the actual academic costs of college. It expands the common definition of academic costs by describing fees and other academic-related costs that students commonly faced and that impacted their academic careers, but that were not usually recognized or officially calculated as academic costs. The chapter demonstrates how these fees increased students’ financial stress and transformed their academic pathways, sometimes driving students out of their preferred academic paths, particularly in professional fields such as nursing or STEM fields such as engineering; and in the most extreme cases, driving them out of the university.

The Official Academic Costs of College The largest academic cost that students face is what is commonly referred to as “tuition” or “tuition and fees.” Although not much different in other states and campuses, tuition and fees are defined by the UW System Board of Regents as follows: Tuition: Includes both academic student fees and nonresident tuition. In the State of Wisconsin statutes, the term “academic student fees” generally applies to resident instructional fees paid by all students, and the term “tuition” applies to the additional amount paid by nonresidents. (2019, Section 5, para. 4)

Beyond the tuition and fees charged to all students, students may face additional fees if they wish to pursue particular academic pathways. Some courses of study charged differential tuition or tiered tuition, which meant students paid an additional amount in tuition dollars to receive a degree in a particular major. According to Wolniak, George, and Nelson (2018), at some universities, students sometimes paid extra for being an upperclassman. In our study, differential tuition based on majors was most common in professional fields that are considered highly remunerative (e.g., engineering). The UW System also allowed campuses to charge

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“fee recovery” costs for all remedial courses (these credits could therefore cost students less or more than “regular” credits). Students could also be charged additional fees for late registration or for registering for online courses, and first-year students were often charged “new student” academic fees. Tuition and fees are included in the COA, but the COA is an average estimate. Students’ individual costs could be higher or lower than the estimate, depending on their particular pathway through college and the fees they incurred. Low- and moderate-income students in the study began college expecting that the COA was an accurate reflection of the academic costs that they would face. All students told us that they entered college expecting to be able to finish their course of study in four years. For most students in our study, however, these assumptions were incorrect. Students’ actual academic costs were both higher than anticipated and continued to multiply over time. For many students, these unanticipated academic costs altered their academic trajectories, leading them to give up their hopes of participating in a study abroad program, change majors when they realized they would not be able to afford the various costs that would be expected of them, or in the most extreme cases, stop out of college altogether. State Funding and Tuition In order to understand why tuition and fees function as they do in Wisconsin, it is necessary to briefly describe the history and politics that have shaped them. The state of Wisconsin has historically invested quite heavily in its public university system. The state covered a high percentage of the cost of instruction, and tuition for Wisconsin residents had therefore been relatively low, with modest increases over time. Tuition generally doubled every decade from the 1940s until the 2000s/2010s, when it increased 140% between 2002 and 2012 (Savidge, 2016). As described in Chapter 1, this more rapid increase in tuition and fees occurred at the same time that there was a more rapid-thanusual decline in state support for public higher education. In 2004, the state covered 53% of the costs of instruction; by 2014, state support had declined to 29% (Schneider, 2014). This shift had significant implications for Wisconsin residents’ access to the UW System. Historically, public funds had covered the majority of the cost of every student’s instruction;

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Hillman (2017) calculates that in 2010, students started paying a larger amount of instructional costs than the state.2 Into this moment of historically high tuition and historically low state funding for higher education, and in a political moment fraught with active efforts to delegitimize and defund the university system, thenGovernor Scott Walker hit the UW System with a one-two punch. Walker froze tuition rates throughout the UW System from the 2013 to 2015 biennial budget onwards (the freeze remains in place through at least 2021). At the same time, he cut the UW System budget by $250 million.3 The pairing of system-wide budget cuts and the tuition freeze for Wisconsin students meant that UW campuses faced immediate budget cuts of up to 20%, and they could not raise these funds through in-state student tuition. Given that at least 66.7% of each university’s student population must be Wisconsin residents, the campuses that received the highest budget cuts had few options but to “do less with less,” as one chancellor put it.4 Responses to the new budget squeeze were limited by the changes that many universities had made in the previous decade, in response to previous cuts. For example, some universities had increased the number of students they accepted each year. Hillman (2017) notes that “About 32,000 more FTE [full-time equivalent] students enroll in the UWS today [2017] compared to 1973, yet [state] funds are about $500 million lower than that year.” Increasing the total number of students who are offered admission to a given campus in response to budget cuts has many consequences that may not be immediately apparent. In a time of budget cuts, it usually means larger class sizes and more courses taught by nontenure-track instructors. It also means less physical space for each student. Schools that had increased enrollment previously were already stretched thin in terms of infrastructure, teaching staff, and student services when

2 Though this was a radical departure for Wisconsin, the UW System still receives a higher proportion of state funding than many other states. 3 For the most part, we do not discuss the reasons for (and the inequities in) the differences evident across campus budget cuts, though these are deserving of additional research and attention (see, e.g., Goldrick-Rab & Kolbe, 2015). It is important to note that in Wisconsin the politics driving the much larger budget cuts faced by RSU and GLU were tightly tied to national politically conservative movements and had deeply racialized tones. 4 Or residents of a state with a cross-state enrollment agreement (e.g., Minnesota).

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the new budget cuts hit. Take, for example, Great Lakes University: at GLU, we regularly observed students sitting on the floor along both sides of hallways in classroom buildings, and students sitting in every available chair in the library and student union (which had been found structurally unsafe but was still in use because of a lack of funds to rebuild it) while they waited for their classes to start. On winter days, when boots had already tracked mud throughout, this meant a cold and uncomfortable wait, and often soiled clothes as a result. Already having cut instructional and staff positions and resources, privatized auxiliary services, and grown student class size, GLU, like with some of our other universities in the study, often had to slash their core activities when the next round of cuts hit. Students began to see quite directly what cost-cutting would mean for their own education. By 2016, newspapers (and students) were reporting cuts to advisors, instructors, courses, and services (Savidge, 2016): student housing started requiring that students provide their own toilet paper in the dorms; students had to wait weeks to meet with advisors who had thousands of students to support; students and instructors started leaving their winter jackets, hats, and even gloves on in class, as classroom thermostats were lowered to save on heating; and lightbulbs started to go unchanged for months at a time, sometimes, leaving staff to bring their own lamps into their offices. As one student advisor noted, “It sends a really bad message to students, that we cannot even literally afford to leave the lights on.” While in some ways these politics were unique to Wisconsin, in many ways they mirrored national trends. The general decline in state funding for higher education was a national phenomenon; the policy to freeze instate tuition rates was a common policy in Republican-led states; and the UW universities’ responses to these changes in funding (e.g., increasing fees, increasing recruitment of out-of-state students, etc.) also mirrored national trends. Tuition Tuition rates for the 2014/2015 academic year at the four universities in which research occurred are outlined in Table 3.1. Because of the freeze, they have remained stable since. It is important to note that these estimations of tuition and fees do not capture the quite different levels of aid available to students at the different campuses, or the costs of living at each university, and therefore the quite different “sticker prices” that students actually paid to

3

Table 3.1 Estimated tuition and fees, full-time enrolled WI residents, 2014/2015a

RSU BU GLU GSU

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Tuition

Fees

$7500 $10,500b $9500 $6500

$1500 $1000 N/S $1000

a All numbers rounded to the nearest $500 to protect university

confidentiality b Combined tuition and fees

attend college. For example, GLU, the most racially diverse of the four campuses, had a significantly higher average sticker price for low-income students than BU, because BU is able to provide more grant and merit aid for students. However, since the reforms to financial aid that occurred in the 1970s, wealthier students have captured an increasing proportion of federal, state, and institutional financial aid, in part because of the broad shift from need-based to merit-based aid. Thus, though lowincome students at BU received more grant aid than students at GLU, moderate-income focal students at both schools had proportionately the same or better aid packages than very low-income focal students once EFC was taken into account. Also, it is important to note that lower sticker prices do not necessarily mean that the particular university is the most cost-effective option. Depending on the college, grants and other aid that are specific to the campus may bring down the overall cost that a student needs to pay, thereby making it less expensive than another campus with an officially lower sticker price. For example, a low-income student who is accepted at both RSU and BU is likely to end up paying less at BU after grant and merit aid are calculated into their financial aid package. Differential Tuition. Taking in-state tuition out of the budgetbalancing picture meant that universities had to cut their programming. They also had to find new sources of revenue. A common campus response to budget cuts was to seek permission to adopt new forms of differential tuition. Many schools had, in the 2000s, requested and been allowed to adopt differential fees for particular majors (e.g., business, engineering). This was a national trend, especially among doctoralgranting institutions (Jaschik, 2012). Differential tuition was a mechanism

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that universities often adopted to shore up funding (particularly for programs that were expensive to run or in high demand) during the budget cuts that occurred in the 2000s. Differential tuitions were high, often 10% or more of the full cost of tuition. Take, for example, engineering first-year students at BU. Intended students could pay up to $2300 in additional fees, including new or incoming student fees, learning community fees, and differentiated engineering school tuition fees. And students who did not have the initial capital to invest in these majors often lost the opportunity to participate. This additional financial pressure, coupled with barriers posed by limited high school course offerings, developmental course requirements, and department cultures that were often felt to be unwelcoming, led some low- and moderateincome students—particularly those also marginalized by race, ethnicity, or gender—to decide not to pursue the major they had entered college hoping to study. For other students in our study, the cost of differential tuition proved a difficult hurdle to overcome and required taking out additional loans or taking on more work, but students did so in order to pursue their dream major. Those who were struggling academically by the end of their first year, however, often felt they had to make the hard decision about whether to continue on with the major in their second year, when they might pay the extra money but fail out of the major anyway. Major-based differential tuition impacted a sub-set of students on each campus: those who were interested in particular, usually high-demand, programs. While this tuition policy certainly impacted the composition of students in particular programs and departments on campus (usually by making the student makeup wealthier, Whiter, and more male), it did not change the overall composition of students on the campus. In the next round of cuts, during the tuition freeze years, campuses sought permission to implement a new form of differential tuition—this time, one that would radically increase tuition for out-of-state and international students. This new form of differentiated tuition led to much greater differences among what students paid to go to college than had ever existed before. For example, at BU, in-state students paid about $10,500 in tuition in 2014–2015, while out-of-state and international students paid about $27,000. Out-of-state students were, to some universities, literally worth three times as much money as in-state students. With such remarkable differences in tuition costs among student groups, the makeup of the student body began to change. UW System

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campuses had historically been legally mandated to have 66.7% of their incoming class be Wisconsin students, so in order to make more tuition money during a tuition freeze that affected Wisconsin residents, campuses had to either increase rates for each out-of-state student significantly, increase the total number of students on campus, or both. Wisconsin’s high school-aged population has been declining, so it was difficult for lesscompetitive university campuses to maintain legally mandated Wisconsin student percentages while significantly increasing the number of out-ofstate students. Thus, more elite campuses chose to increase the number of Wisconsin students they accepted, and all campuses chose to increase the tuition paid by out-of-state students.5 This decision meant that the type of out-of-state student who could afford a UW education changed. Out-of-state, including international, students’ families now tend to be much wealthier than Wisconsin students’ families. This class differentiation has had consequences oncampus climate, student relations, and different groups of students’ expectations for university services and amenities. The implications of these consequences for low-income students’ well-being and for the public mandate of the university need to be carefully studied as campuses make decisions about what to cut and what to prioritize. Two types of consequences are particularly important in understanding low- and moderate-income students’ college experiences, and in determining what policies may undermine the public mandate of the university: those that impact the student body and “school culture” and those that impact the institution and its core policies and practices. As out-of-state tuition fees increased, campuses and students began to experience the consequences of greater class differentiation between Wisconsin and out-of-state students, and the greater financial value of out-of-state students to the school’s budget. This led, as has also been described by Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) and Han, Jaquette, and Salazar (2019), to campus cultures and practices that were unwelcoming to low-income students, that asked them to pay for wealthier students’

5 UW-Madison, the UW System’s flagship campus, recently brokered a complex deal in which the campus can accept more out-of-state students than was previously allowed. The percentage of Wisconsin residents will fall below the 66.7% threshold, but the number of Wisconsin residents admitted to the university will stay the same, even though the overall population of eligible undergraduate-age students is declining.

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interests and activities, and that sometimes prioritized recruitment, retention, and the academic interests of out-of-state students. Students at BU, for example, reported that they felt out of place and uncomfortable in classrooms where their out-of-state peers had their own personal laptops, talked together about the vacations that they were going on over the school break, and expressed surprise or disgust at farming and animal husbandry practices in which rural students were involved. Wealthier students, including those who had access to financial resources through relatives, had very different college experiences than their low- and moderate-income colleagues. Those who participated in our study lived and ate in different (more expensive) dorms, socialized in different (more expensive) restaurants and clubs, went on vacations during breaks, joined study groups and regularly attended office hours, participated in high-impact practices (such as study abroad, living and learning communities, and internships), volunteered with groups that could support their professional aims, and took on time-consuming leadership roles in academic and extracurricular groups. They spoke about these experiences during class, and they brought these experiences to bear when they applied for competitive majors, for grants and awards, and for internships and jobs. Low- and moderate-income students struggled to participate in this wealthier college experience, as we describe below. More importantly, most out-of-state students (and wealthier Wisconsin students) did not have to work. They had the time and resources to study and socialize, join groups, pick up new hobbies, and visit home when they wanted to do so. Their families usually did not expect them to contribute financially, and indeed, often provided support to their students in multiple ways. Low- and moderate-income students in the study, in contrast, were often right on the edge or moving into financial instability, and their families were as well. They had to work more hours and take out more loans, could not afford the higher-cost goods and experiences their wealthier peers took for granted, and their families could seldom help them out financially, even in cases of emergency. Consequently, they could find themselves unable to afford to stay in college simply as a result of unexpected academic fees.

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Institutional Policies and Class Differentiation While increasing tuition for some groups of students had evident benefits for universities’ bottom lines, these decisions have led to a student body that is increasingly class-differentiated. In our study, we saw how students’ experiences diverged along class lines, with low-income students and wealthy students on the same campus in some cases appearing to have almost entirely differentiated college experiences. They lived, ate, socialized, and even learned in different places. They spent vastly different number of hours on campus, and they used those hours differently. These differences resulted in an important geographic pattern for students: the less wealth a student had at their disposal, the more likely that the campus was not at the center of their daily routines. Lowerincome students often spent much more time off campus—for work, to eat and sleep, with family—and when on campus, they often only spent time in very limited spaces (e.g., their dorm room, a few classrooms, and the library). The more financially secure the student, the more likely that their life revolved around the campus and the services around it—which, in turn, increasingly catered to wealthier students: from grocery stores, to restaurants, to volunteer opportunities, to talks by experts and musical performances by world-renowned musicians. This meant wealthier students got to know and take advantage of campus resources; it allowed them to create academic, social, emotional, professional, and other networks on campus; it provided them with additional learning opportunities; it meant they were more likely to be able to eat, go to the bathroom, and rest during the day; and it significantly decreased the amount of time they lost in commuting to and from campus, a constraint which so many low- and moderate-income students faced. Class differences among the student body were exacerbated by policies and practices that universities adopted. For example, as Armstrong and Hamilton (2013) explain, public universities that are trying to attract wealthier, out-of-state students may spend money on infrastructure, programs, and socio-academic experiences that are particularly attractive to these students and their college goals. The campuses in our study adopted similar policies; for example, two of them built new student unions that added hundreds of dollars a year to the segregated fees that in-state students paid. All four campuses built new, more-expensive residence halls (usually equipped with cafes, study areas, and other amenities that older residence halls did not have) designed to attract wealthier and

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typically out-of-state students who could pay hundreds of dollars more per semester. Wealthy students who could afford these halls had differentiated access to food, gym equipment, kitchens, and other amenities that in turn saved them money and time. Campuses also spent resources expanding their Summer offerings and their Study Abroad offerings, even though multiple studies have found that low-income students do not access these programs at the same rate as wealthier students, and this difference appears to be fueled at least in part by financial constraints (e.g., Whatley, 2017).6 In other words, high academic (and other college) costs led to differentiated student experiences, which in turn led to fundamentally different opportunities, support structures, and likely academic pathways for different students. This should worry policymakers who care about educational equity. And, it should worry universities that care about making college affordable and responsive to all students they accept for admission.

The True Costs of Academics Academic Program Costs Students experienced a wide range of fees and costs related to their academic programs that did not appear to be fully accounted for in the COA. These costs were particularly high for students taking multiple STEM or art classes. They ranged from unexpectedly high charges for some textbooks and associated materials (e.g., workbooks, homework sheets, online supplementary materials), to unexpected requirements to buy specialized equipment for classes or majors, to unexpected fees related to course waitlists or course program fees (e.g., for online courses or for required courses that filled quickly). Furthermore, simple mistakes or administrative delays (e.g., those leading to late enrollment for courses) could lead to hundreds of dollars in additional fees. All told, for most students these additional fees ranged from a low of $75 to hundreds of dollars a semester. Generally, students in our study found that if they took courses in highly desired majors (such as engineering or nursing), if they had to take 6 Though note the complex relationship between class, race, and gender in patterns of study abroad, as described in Salisbury, Paulsen, and Pascarella (2011).

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developmental courses, if they took online courses, or if they took courses that required extensive additional materials (such as art classes), they faced steeper unexpected fees. And students who started down the path to a major that accrued many additional fees—including higher tuition fees (e.g., engineering) and expectations for extensive out-of-class experiences (e.g., nursing)—often found themselves changing majors.7 This in turn added to the long-term cost of tuition, as changing majors often resulted in new course requirements that added one or two semesters to a student’s timeline. Differential tuition often unfortunately dissuaded some of the students from pursuing their intended majors due to the high additional unforeseen costs. Testing into developmental classes—something that was more likely to happen to low-income students whose high schools had fewer college preparatory resources—also often impacted costs and time to degree, because these courses came with additional fees; were costly to test out of; and although students paid for the courses, the credits did not count toward students’ graduation requirements. At GSU, the students in developmental math classes were disproportionately low-income and female-identified, and often had been discouraged from taking a fourth year of mathematics coursework in high school (roughly 20% of first year, female students were placed into developmental math, and they made up about 80% of enrollees in the class, at a university where about 60% of students identified as male). These students were not generally poor at math. They did not struggle in the developmental course, but they were out of practice when first arriving at GSU and taking course placement exams, and the exam to re-test out of developmental math—which many students believed they could have done with minimal refreshment—had to be paid in cash, which few students had the funds to do. They then found themselves required to pay for and take coursework covering old material. Some of the students had no interest in majors that required further math classes, but for those who had hoped to pursue majors that had math prerequisites (such as most STEM majors), their access was curtailed, if not closed off, as they

7 Stange (2015) reports lower engineering and business major rates for women and minoritized students at universities that differentiate tuition, pointing to the “price sensitivity” of these groups. This research points to how students’ experiences in school may also add to the long-term inequities in degree granting that are evident in the research.

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lost one or two valuable semesters before they could begin coursework in these majors. For those students who struggled with the content in developmental math courses, the reasons they struggled were not always clear. One might assume that they tested into a developmental class because they were not prepared for college, and that any struggles they had in their classes were due to their own lack of college preparation. Certainly, this appeared to be the case for some students. But, in many cases, it appeared that students who tested into developmental classes found themselves stuck navigating some of the same inequalities they had faced in their high schools. Low-income students were more likely than their wealthier peers to have attended high schools with less experienced and lower-qualified teachers and fewer resources and course offerings. In their developmental classes, they often found themselves taking classes with less experienced or lower-qualified instructors, and having to take classes online (which was usually not the preferred option for students) or through third providers. It was not clear, then, whether students were lacking the skills to succeed in developmental classes, or whether the classes were under-resourced and poorly run, and low-income students were paying the price for this. Students in particular majors (e.g., nursing, business, engineering) often faced hidden program costs on top of differential tuition and other fees. These costs differed significantly across programs. This was certainly the case for students who wanted to pursue a career in the highly competitive nursing field. At GLU, RSU, and BU, low-income nursing students found out that they had to pay hundreds of dollars in medical fees to receive the check-ups, vaccinations, and certifications that they needed to volunteer in hospitals. This kind of volunteer work was expected of students who were applying for the nursing program, yet it entailed hidden costs. The admissions committee told students that they valued and looked positively at student applicants who had taken on extracurricular activities like volunteering in a local hospital or filling a leadership role in a health-focused student organization. From the admissions committee’s perspective, these were signs of an active, engaged, and prepared student. But low-income students paid a significant price for not having the time or money to undertake such activities, let alone having to pay for all the additional fees to volunteer. Indeed, all but one of the seven focal students who began the study hoping to become a nurse switched majors or were denied entry into the major. There were multiple reasons

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for these outcomes, but one of them certainly appeared to be lowincome students’ systematic inability to engage in costly health-related extracurricular activities. Students reported that expenses for nursing majors collecting clinical hours included the nursing uniforms, stethoscope, nametags, lab fees, blood tests, shots, drug screening, background checks, and uniform shoes; moreover, the time and transportation costs to travel to various clinics and hospitals added to the overall expense for nursing majors. These fees were highest for students whose families had not been able to afford insurance and who had therefore skipped check-ups and vaccines in the past. Similarly, accounting majors faced exam fees and equipment costs to receive certifications, and art students had to pay for museum and site visits on top of having to pay for expensive sketching tools. Students in a range of programs also reported paying for exams to either gain entry into a major/school or to be more competitive for internships and jobs. For example, one student paid $160 for access to actuarial exam study materials for 100 days. Students at BU and RSU also expressed concern about what they saw as increasing demands that they double-major or get additional certifications in order to be competitive on the job market after graduation. They calculated that these efforts would cost them an additional semester of course-taking, or additional fees for non-credit bearing certificates. Students who wanted to study abroad faced high program attendance costs, and then sometimes additional costs because credits did not transfer, while students who wanted to participate in other “high impact practices” directly related to their career goals, like internships and living and learning communities, often had to pay hundreds of dollars in additional fees to access these opportunities, or required students to take time off of paid work that they could not afford. In almost all of these cases, students’ academic costs had already exceeded the estimated “tuition and fees” in their COA. Faced with the additional costs of desired (but not required) learning experiences, students sometimes decided they could not afford to do them. But the decision to restrict costs in this way often had long-term consequences. All of the “additional” costs described above were directly related to students’ programs of study and to their future career goals, but they were not calculated in the COA. Perhaps more importantly for an analysis of (in)equity, these are exactly the kinds of expenses and experiences that are

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increasingly just expected of students, on both the “majors market” and the job market. Yet, they require additional time and money from students that are not calculated in the COA. As we show below, this diminished some students’ ability to pursue desired majors. Academic Fees Differential tuition policies had significant consequences for campus cultures. But they were at least publicized costs, of which students were aware. Campuses also often increased non-tuition academic fees to address budget cuts. Given the limited options that most UW campuses faced in finding new sources of revenue, many campuses chose to increase these fees dramatically. Unlike tuition increases, students seldom had complete information about rising fees—or the growing cuts in services and programs that often accompanied them as universities wrestled with “doing less with less.” Moreover, students seldom knew about newly installed fees or new cuts to services before attempting to use them. For example, in past years there was no charge at RSU for music students to use the music practice rooms. During the first year of the study, however, music students were charged a $35 fee for using the practice rooms. The band conductor said this charge was due to the budget cuts. At GSU, students’ $25 free printing budget was lowered to $3. Although these are seemingly small fees, they were introduced in various places across campus programs, often without warning. For current students, these new or increased fees were unavoidable, unplanned for in their budget, and piled rapidly on top of each other. Additional academic-related fees often appeared after course registration for new students in the form of hidden and unforeseen fees or penalties. Common fees included: • • • • • •

BU students paid an additional $340 in first-year fees GSU first-year students faced registration fees of over $140 First years and transfers paid up to $75 in placement exam fees Instructional fees for dance and athletic classes Late registration fees started at $50 2.75% credit card convenience charge

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At GLU, during the fall semester when spaces for a required introductory English class were unavailable, students on the waiting list had to sign up to take the online version of the class. Later that semester, they found that they had been charged an “online course fee” of over $250. Just weeks into their first semester at college, most students faced hundreds of dollars of unexpected academic fees and were being charged well beyond what was estimated in the COA. Students often did not know about this fee until they checked their invoice, which was generated after the course drop deadline. This was deeply destabilizing for the most lowincome students. New fees were generated by diverse units across each campus, but the reason each unit was charging new fees was usually the same: in the new austerity era, each unit had to sink or swim on their own. The “Fee for Services” Model In order to meet budget cuts, most universities ordered many units, but particularly “auxiliary services” (housing, food services, libraries, health services, etc.) to find ways to become self-sufficient. As one food service director explained, “we are all our own boats now, we have to float on our own bottoms.” Yet greater self-sufficiency for these campus units almost always translated into efforts by each unit to levy new fees and shift additional costs onto students’ backs. Worse, because cost-recovery models often pitted units against one another, it appeared that units were competing to stay afloat, as opposed to communicating and collaborating to improve students’ experiences and lower their costs. As with universities’ efforts to increase tuition, the consequences of these decisions had a greater impact on students with fewer financial resources at their disposal. Furthermore, because the logics underlying these policies positioned students as consumers and the university as a producer that aimed to capture the greatest possible “profit” from an encounter, some of the policies actually led to lower-income students paying more than wealthier students. For example, as described in Chapter 4, some food services started rewarding students who bought larger meal plans upfront by giving them more meal points per dollar than they gave to students who could only afford the least-expensive meal plan. Low-income students who could not afford more-expensive meal plans therefore paid more for each meal than did their wealthier counterparts.

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Researchers have begun documenting the inequitable consequences of the cost-recovery model in housing, dining, health, infrastructure, and recreational sports policies and funding mechanisms in public universities (discussed in Chapters 4 and 5); here, we examine the classinequitable impacts of pressures on academically important auxiliary services to shift costs to students. These include library services (Franklin, 2007), technology services, printing services, and university textbook services/bookstores—all services with which low-income students had regular contact, and each of which was essential to their access to academic programming. To show how such differentiation occurs and its consequences for students, we briefly describe BU’s computer services policies and practices, and then review library user fees at the different campuses. Tech Policies and Services. Technology policies have a significant impact on students’ academic experiences: on all four campuses, whether deliberately or not, faculty, staff, and administrators largely assumed that students had access to a computer (and to a good Internet connection) outside of class time, and when off campus. Many core academic processes—from enrolling in classes, to downloading readings, to completing and uploading assignments, to paying bills and checking out library resources, to accessing required courses in online formats—are now computer- and Internet-reliant. Yet, students’ (and their families’) access to laptops and Internet was unevenly distributed along class lines. The students with the fewest family resources in our study were consistently less likely to own their own computer—or to have one in good enough shape to use it reliably. From a university’s perspective, addressing low-income students’ access to laptops is quite a different issue than addressing the risks posed by having students (and faculty and staff) use private computers in ways that pose security threats to the university. The first issue was addressed largely by the libraries and academic departments, which often had programs to lend computers to students who did not have their own. The second issue was addressed by the university’s computer support and services office. BU’s computer support and services office provided students who had their own computers with free Office software, antivirus software, and a variety of other software packages that in total would usually cost a student hundreds of dollars a year or more. The reasons for providing these software services, we were told, related to contracts that the university had with software providers to cover services for faculty and staff, and

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efforts to control the security threats that could make their way into the campus system via student computers that were not properly protected. Whatever the reasons for this campus policy, the result was that when a wealthier student who could afford their own laptop comes to campus, they quickly learned that they had saved hundreds of dollars in software costs by becoming a BU student. In contrast, students who could not afford their own laptop often had to borrow one from the library. The libraries did not have enough laptops to meet student demand, so they rationed laptop borrowing. They did so by only allowing students to check out a laptop for up to 72 hours and by charging a steep fee for late returns: up to $12 per hour. While it was difficult to juggle a 72-hour check in/checkout schedule when living on campus, many low-income students moved far off campus to cheaper housing options as soon as they were able to do so (usually their second year). Students living off campus then had to add in time to get to the library, check back in and then re-check out their laptop every three days. This added trip was usually juggled against work and class schedules that sometimes made it nearly impossible to return the laptop on time. The students also might not be given the same laptop each time they returned to the library; this meant that students had to carefully erase all of their work from the laptop every three days. So, lower-income students often found that the common assumption among faculty that students had ready access to online materials and email required them to juggle yet another costly (in time and money) transaction in order to access what was now considered a basic tool for college. This pattern of having a difficult and costly system that low-income students had to navigate to gain access to a laptop, and what amounted almost to a reward system for students with their own laptops was mirrored in the tech policies at other campuses as well. Equipment rentals at each campus carried high hidden fees. For example, laptop rental periods at some other campuses were only 48 hours long, while late fines ranged from $5 to $20 an hour. Other campuses also had policies that benefited wealthy students by allowing those with their own equipment to access free or low-cost campus services. At RSU, for example, most services and software provided by Learning and Technology Services (LTS) were free or subsidized. LTS offered free workshops and tutorials, and students could download Microsoft products onto their personal computers as part of their tuition and fees. Students could also bring their

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personal laptops and other electronic devices into LTS for repairs, and most repairs completed in-house were covered. BU and RSU did not adopt these technology policies to try to treat lower-income and higher-income students differently or to inequitably impact their academic experiences: the units involved in shaping wealthier versus lower-income students’ computing experiences were different and were not directly communicating with one another. Libraries, which generally faced larger cuts to their budgets than technology services units, were responsible for students’ access to digital equipment and media; while technology services offices were responsible for responding to the growing security threats that campuses faced. Low-income students and the realities of their complex schedules and very real need for laptop access faded into the background of debates about what to prioritize and what to cut that occurred in each unit, because neither unit was charged with serving low-income students directly—they were responsible for serving students as an undifferentiated category. This pattern of class-“neutral” policies in fact having deeply classdifferentiated effects is neither unique to UW campuses (e.g., Rauscher & Elliott, 2014) nor to higher education in general; it has been documented across social sectors in the United States (e.g., Desmond, 2016; Sanchez & Brenman, 2008; Sobol, 2017). As other scholars note, social policies that do not actively account for income-differentiated outcomes tend to fuel existing inequities. Creating class-responsive policies and practices requires an active effort on the part of institutions, and BU and RSU did not pursue such an effort. Library Policies and Services. Students at all campuses had access to on-campus library and technology rental services, as well as to the Inter-Library Loan (ILL) system. In practice, however, as with library computing rentals, accessing these materials often came with unexpected, sometimes ballooning, costs. Generally, students could check out all library and tech materials without paying an upfront cost. Late fees for these materials accrued rapidly, however. Late fees for library materials were generally around $0.25 a day, with students being charged replacement fees between 28 and 50 days after the overdue date. In some cases, the first late fee notice that students received was sent five days after the overdue date (i.e., the student has already been charged $1.25 per book). Late fees for reserved items (including, usually, textbooks placed on reserve for classes) were much higher. For example, at BU, the library charged a $2 per hour fine for late reserve items, up to $50.

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Policies on late fees, replacement fees, and damage fees varied across campuses. For example, at GLU students were blocked from library and other rental privileges when they accrued just $5 worth of fines. At RSU, they were blocked at $10 of fines. Students received $5 fines if they did not pick up books borrowed through ILL, and a $5 fine if they returned an ILL book without the paper band that accompanied it. At GSU, in contrast, they were blocked at $210 of fines. Fees and fines could easily snowball. Take, for example, a student at GLU who had to rush home when he found out that his mother was in the hospital. He traveled back and forth to his family’s home, trying to juggle family, school, and work for the following few weeks. Needless to say, he did not return his library books during this time. When he finally got around to returning the books, he was charged approximately $20. In hindsight, although he didn’t think $20 was a whole lot of money, it was one that as he explained, set him “off the rail.” The traveling costs, parking tickets he sometimes received when meters ran out by the hospital, having to miss work, and then to have a library fine was what tipped him over the edge. He decided angrily that he was not going to pay, until he found out that he couldn’t register for the following semester due to his library fines. At all universities, students with blocks on their records could not register for classes, request transcripts, graduate, or take other major steps in their academic careers. By the time they cleared their library account, they had often missed the registration deadline, which then led to new, usually much higher (e.g., $50) fees. As in many other arenas of hidden costs, hidden academic costs often resulted in the students who had the greatest resources getting more from the university. Textbooks and Supplies. Textbooks and course supplies were another area in which students often reported unexpected costs. On most campuses, as indicated in Table 3.2, the official estimated academic COA consisted largely of tuition and books/supplies costs. In some cases, some academic costs (such as art supplies, planners, and computers) were considered part of “miscellaneous” costs. On other campuses, these costs were not accounted for in any category. Textbooks and other supplies constituted another area of the university where the logic of fee-for-service—or just straightforward privatization— played out clearly. University bookstores, online textbook providers, even individual faculty members, played roles in shaping students’ ability (or inability) to avoid expensive textbook and supplies charges. Some

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Table 3.2 Estimated academic costs beyond tuition and feesa

RSU GSU BU GLU

Books/supplies

Personal/Misc

$400 $400 $1200 $800

$2100 $2000 $3300/$2400b $2000

a All estimates rounded to the nearest $100 b $3300 estimated cost for on-campus students; $2400 estimated

cost for off-campus students

instructors appeared to make herculean efforts to assure that students’ costs stayed low. Others appeared blithely unconcerned—or completely uninformed—about students’ struggles with the costs of course-taking. Students were canny and did their best to avoid the worst of the charges, but textbook providers were well-aware of this and were offering professors new textbook “bundling” strategies designed to assure that students purchased the materials every semester, thereby not allowing students to purchase pre-owned books. Most students said that, though they expected to pay for learning materials, they had not expected textbooks and other course costs to be as high as they were. They were unhappy that the COA estimates appeared to be off, and they often felt taken advantage of by the university and its apparent disinterest in making their educational experience affordable. The COA estimate for textbooks at GLU, for example, was $800, yet students routinely paid hundreds of dollars more than this. Even on campuses that included textbook rental services in the COA, students found that some courses required additional books or lab manuals that were not included in the rental service. At RSU, for example, this included foreign language textbooks and workbooks, writing seminar readers, and many science textbooks and lab manuals, which are among the pricier textbooks. These costs, while an unexpected difficulty for many students, were particularly overwhelming for low-income students whose majors did not allow them much flexibility in which courses they had to take and when they had to take them. For example, two RSU pre-nursing students were required to take Chemistry and Biology classes in the same semester. Each of those classes required several textbooks and lab manuals. Together,

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they cost about $350—well above the COA—and placed significant pressure on the students’ finances that semester. Students across various campuses said they felt that individual faculty members or the university were deliberately making students pay for more-expensive textbooks by creating new “bundling” strategies that blocked students from accessing all of the course materials unless they bought (usually from the university bookstore) a new copy of the most recent version of the textbook being used. For example, one BU student said: “The university really pushes the bookstore because the professor makes us buy the textbook through them to get the online access code for the homework.” Students tried to employ a laundry list of strategies to avoid buying textbooks at the campus bookstore, including renting from Web sites like slugbooks.com, buying used books online or from friends who took the class the previous semester, sharing books with classmates, checking out the book from the library, or accessing previous editions of the textbook online. When faculty employed bundling practices, however, students could not use these strategies. One student at BU, a junior in Mechanical Engineering, proudly said he had employed every possible strategy to avoid purchasing high-cost textbooks at the campus bookstore. In Spring 2015, however, he had no choice but to purchase a physics textbook from the bookstore for $180, as the professor had bundled together the new edition of the textbook, the online course material, and a packet of worksheets. Midway through the semester, the student was fuming because “I have not yet opened that textbook, even once!” iClickers were another high cost and source of frustration for students across campuses. Clickers were used to take attendance and participate in class surveys, which made them essential for class. Clickers generally cost from $50 to $75, but, like textbooks, they were unevenly used in the classes that required their purchase. Clicker rental prices were high on most campuses, but clicker purchases could end up being even more costly, as the technology advances rapidly and students were sometimes asked to buy the most updated version of the technology to participate in their large lecture classes. Though students on most campuses were facing the possibility of having to rent or buy multiple iClicker models, the universities seemed unaware or uninterested in addressing this additional cost. Lastly, students from multiple campuses expressed frustration and anger with costs associated with printing off their own homework and

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notes from courses. Students reported printing costs of up to $3 a week per class, and students often took 6–8 classes per year. This frustration was compounded for students on campuses that cut student printing budgets. Yet departments, facing their own budget shortages, often admonished their faculty and staff to “save trees and money” by having students print out assignments, papers, syllabi, and other materials that in the past departments or individual instructors often printed for students. Table 3.3 lists the most common financial hidden academic costs faced by students in the study at each campus. Networking and Professional Development Universities do not include the estimated costs of professional development and networking in their COAs. For students who hope to pursue professional development and networking opportunities in college, hidden costs may again reshape their experiences and expectations. Professional organizations usually require joining fees or fees to support group activities. In some cases, students may face additional costs related, for example, to buying the kinds of clothes expected by the group. For students who reported that fees stopped them from joining professional groups, the financial cost was often overshadowed by the social and emotional consequences of feeling that they could not take part in activities they assumed would be central to their college experience and to their opportunities after college. The quality of students’ experiences of networking at college is no small thing; career networking, including through campus organizations and connections, can increase students’ understandings of potential career paths and their post-college career opportunities (Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Parks-Yancy, 2012). Hidden costs associated with professional development and networking activities differed across campuses, from $200 to over $1000. They commonly included items such as membership fees to professional organizations, professional wardrobe costs, printing costs, travel to conferences or networking events, unpaid Summer internships that cut into paid work hours and/or required travel or relocation expenses, and the costs of hosting networking events. At all campuses, then, professional development came at a price. For example, at RSU, students majoring in Information Systems (which is housed in the School of Business) were required to take “professional development” courses that included “how to dress like a professional” and

TOTAL up to $1000+

Field trip fees

$50

TOTAL up to $2000+

Medical requirements for Nursing Program Laptop Computer

$35

$1000+

$200–$300

Major-specific $700+ supplies & course fees (e.g., Nursing)

Clickers/responder cards

$38.50

$35

Textbooks

Library material Up to $1610 and equipment fines/replacement fees Buying books not $150 included in rental service

Professional development courses in college of business Music practice rooms

$200–$800

BU

Hidden academic financial costs

RSU

Table 3.3

TOTAL up to $465+

Online homework from textbooks Major-specific supplies (e.g., nursing)

Clickers

GLU

$200+

$200+

$65

$6000+

$70

$100

Major-specific $50+ add-ons (e.g., Ed cert) Major-specific $40+ per course materials (e.g., Art supplies) TOTAL up to $6000+

Major-specific 5-year graduation expectations

Textbook rental return fees

MathXL (developmental math)

GSU

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“dinner etiquette.” The courses cost between $16 and $40 each. Another student paid $30 for a lifetime membership to the RSU Career Link site, which provides job and internship postings and tools and resources to build a resume and cover letter. The cost of presenting oneself as a professional-in-training on campus, particularly at BU, could also be considerable. For example, a number of students reported that they did not expect to have to buy a professional wardrobe while in college. Low-income students often did not engage in the kinds of social and extracurricular activities in high school that had led them to invest in such a wardrobe during their high school careers, and their parents were less likely to be able to share such a wardrobe with them nor point them to where to purchase appropriate professional attire at a reasonable price. Lower-income students thus often faced a significantly higher cost than wealthier students to put together professional outfits. Putting together such a wardrobe required the upfront cost to pay for items like clothing, shoes, a briefcase/bag, makeup, and an iron. Parents of current students advised parents of first-year students on the Facebook page for “BU parents” that their child would need at least one professional outfit by the “majors fair” in October. Wealthier students acquired this wardrobe and used it at career fairs and internship and job interviews, and then during pre-professional internships. In contrast, one low-income student borrowed money from her mother to buy $500 worth of professional clothing for her first internship over the summer after her first year at BU. She spent about half of the stipend she earned from the internship to pay off the debt for the clothing. She was able to arrange very-low-cost room and board for the duration of the internship through a “church family,” but lacking this fortunate windfall, she would not have been able to accept the internship.

The Costs of Marginalization One of the strongest motivating factors for the students in our study to attend university was to pursue a desired academic and professional pathway. Many students had dreamed of and prepared for these paths for years: nursing, engineering, teaching, business, and other programs, which often had a competitive application process to enter the college as a major in that field, or to enter the major once in college. Yet many of these students found themselves derailed from their desired academic pathway early on. This derailment was often caused by a complicated interaction

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between the unexpected financial and time costs of pursuing the major, and low-income students’ experiences of struggle or failure with required classes for the major. These struggles were in turn often predicated on the lack of advanced course-taking opportunities in their less-resourced rural and urban high schools and their more limited social and familial networks on which to draw for academic support. In some cases, students also reported feeling marginalized or disrespected by peers, advisors, and faculty in the major, or even in some cases being actively discouraged from pursuing it. All of the low-income focal students in our study at BU experienced an acute realization that this combination of factors would be an obstacle to their academic success; in particular, they reported reaching this realization after receiving low grades back from their first round of midterms during their first semester of college. For example, three of the BU focal students working toward admission into competitive majors (biology, the nursing program, the business school, and the teacher education program), all found themselves struggling to make progress after low midterm grades during their first semester. All three were ultimately redirected through advising (or by failed applications to the desired program) to pursue personally less-desirable programs that lacked a gate-keeping application process. These new programs of study generally had less clearcut links to well-paying jobs after college, and also cost the students an additional year or two of tuition, as they had to take additional courses to fulfill their new majors. Students reported experiencing high social, relational, and emotional costs associated with academics over the course of their first three semesters in college. Their narratives about these costs clearly demonstrated how intertwined their experiences of financial and social, relational, and emotional costs were in practice. For example, Belinda, a student from a low-income urban neighborhood who attended a high school that offered few advanced courses, was surprised when she tested into GLU’s developmental math track. She had expected to be able to start coursework toward her desired philosophy major immediately. Instead, she found herself paying hundreds of dollars extra to register for an online developmental course, as the face-to-face class was already full. This additional fee, plus others she faced for housing, led her to take on additional hours of work soon after she began classes. By the middle of the semester, she realized that she was at risk of failing the developmental math class. This, in turn, led her to question her ability to make it in

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college, and increased her worries that the money she was spending on college would not result in a degree. As her own sense of her capabilities wavered, her performance in the class suffered, but her work hours stopped her from being able to attend extra advising or tutoring sessions for the class. In the end, Belinda failed the class, and eventually stopped out of school in her third semester.8 Many students also reported that program options and learning environments were discriminatory and did not support their needs. Minoritized students on all campuses reported classroom and campus environments in which they regularly faced open hostility from peers had to listen to instructors make bigoted remarks and had to fend off the emotional hurt of micro-aggressions and of feeling hyper-visible in many spaces. They struggled to find people who could talk to them about the concerns they had and the pressures they faced. Some had their academic advisors suggest that they drop their career goals. Others had to sit silently while their right to belong in the university was questioned, or confronted peers or instructors and were told they were being thin-skinned. Students of color at BU, as a staff member who served on the campus Hate and Bias Response Committee explained, “are always being questioned about their scholarship programs” by their white peers—“What program are you with,” or more directly, “You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for your scholarship.” This type of microaggression was so common at BU that it was difficult to find a student of color who had not experienced this or, at minimum, who did not have a close friend on campus who had such an experience. Most students of color soon stopped even considering reporting such experiences, either because they felt that such micro-aggressions were so commonplace that they did not warrant reporting, or because they did not felt that the university would respond proactively to a complaint. This concern that university administrations would not take action when students experienced bias or discrimination at the hands of their peers or university employees was reinforced by students’ and their friends’ lived experiences. For example, Veronica, a Latina student who attended RSU, filed a bias incident report when an instructor made a racist comment about undocumented immigrants in the class. Nothing came of her report, and consequently Veronica both hated going to class 8 Two of the campuses had significant issues with low-income students failing developmental math classes. This was particularly true for female students.

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as a result of this hostile environment, and grew increasingly upset over the university’s unwillingness to engage in a serious conversation about such incidences on campus. These hidden costs again were much more prevalent and impactful in the narratives of low-income and otherwise minoritized students. In addition to students of color feeling excluded from spaces that were central to their academic success, African-American, Latinx, and Hmong students felt that (excluding one or two specialist ethnic studies courses) the curricula at their universities lacked high-quality and critical course content regarding their own history and culture. For example, while the Hmong are the largest Asian American community in the state, teaching on Hmong history is limited at BU and it is more often represented as footnote to the Cold War and United States geopolitics; and Hmong culture is still taught using outdated readings full of inaccuracies and stereotypes. Both through the curriculum and through experiences of exclusion from campus spaces, learning experiences were organized in such a way that minoritized students were marginalized, dismissed, and came to feel that certain places, degrees, and learning experiences were not open to them.

Managing Hidden Costs The size, range, and purposes of the hidden academic costs that students faced differed significantly across campuses; it is important to remember, then, that some students faced much higher unexpected costs than others, and that the impact of these unexpected (and therefore unbudgeted) fees differed depending on students’ financial situations. Financial costs also interacted with other COA overages (e.g., in housing and dining). For example, students often learned about the true academic costs of college once their semester was already underway, and often at the same time that they learned about the full costs they would pay related to housing, dining, and other living expenses (e.g., toiletries, health care costs, etc.). Later in that first year, many students learned that their financial aid grants would diminish in their second year (as some universities enticed accepted high school seniors by providing first-year grants that did not continue into the second year, and some students found that their calculated EFC changed radically, whether their actual financial situation did or not) and that balancing costs by increasing work hours often negatively impacted their grades.

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Students’ strategies for addressing rising, hidden costs reflected the timing of the fees and how students responded to the growing realization that college would cost more than they had thought. Some students, just weeks into the semester, realized that they had no financial cushion left. Relatively small fees therefore took on great importance. For example, RSU required first-year students to pay a $100 deposit at the time they registered for classes. Some students did not have the money on hand to cover this hidden cost, but could ask relatives to help out. Others did not have this option. Some students then told their academic advisors that they had to stop out of school because they could not afford the $100 deposit. In some cases, the advisors took the student to the financial aid office and requested a waiver or deferment for the deposit. In others, the advisors did not offer this option. For some students, these hidden fees were difficult, but manageable. In the most extreme cases, advisors reported that fees caused students to stop out of school and lose their first semester of tuition. Students who realized they could not afford the college they were in sometimes attempted to survive financially by dropping classes or stopping out of college. However, these responses also often resulted in unexpected fees. For example, at RSU, students had to pay a $50 fee in order to get a refund for tuition paid for a class that was dropped early in the semester. Kyle, an RSU student, decided to stop out of college altogether at the end of his current semester; he therefore decided not to continue attending classes midway through the semester. Before making this decision, he spoke with the financial aid office to learn how stopping out would affect his financial aid package. The officer told him he might want to try to pass at least one class because if he were to fail all his classes he might have to pay back some of his grants to the university. Since the financial aid officer didn’t stress passing classes during the conversation, Kyle decided to focus on work (which he enjoyed doing, and which he planned to do full-time once the semester ended) rather than school. In June, he received a bill for $1500 from the university, since he did not pass any of his classes. He was very frustrated that the financial officer did not stress the financial repercussions of his decision, particularly because— as he had explained to the financial officer—the decision to stop out was in large part motivated by financial hardship.

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Conclusion This chapter discussed how the difference between official and experienced academic costs can accumulate in ways that impact students’ ability to succeed, to peruse particular academic tracks, to prepare for a career, and to participate in a university that equally values and serves each of its students. These hidden costs to being students limited access to academic programs, supports, and success and limited the ability of minoritized students to participate in those setting in an equitable manner vis-a-vis their white majority peers. Hidden and escalating costs, which low-income students were ill-resourced to accommodate, were thus a primary factor in shaping profoundly different college experiences for low- and middle-income students and their more affluent peers.

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Østergaard, C. R., Timmermans, B., & Kristinsson, K. (2011). Does a different view create something new? The effect of employee diversity on innovation. Research Policy, 40(3), 500–509. Parks-Yancy, R. (2012). Interactions into opportunities: Career management for low-income, first-generation African American college students. Journal of College Student Development, 53(4), 510–523. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd. 2012.0052. Rauscher, E., & Elliott, W., III. (2014). The effect of wealth inequality on higher education outcomes. A Critical Review Sociology Mind, 14, 282–297. Salisbury, M. H., Paulsen, M. B., & Pascarella, E. T. (2011). Why do all the study abroad students look alike? Applying an integrated student choice model to explore differences in the factors that influence White and minority students’ intent to study abroad. Research in Higher Education, 52(2), 123–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-010-9191-2. Sanchez, T., & Brenman, M. (2008). The right to transportation: Moving to equity. Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge. Savidge, N. (2016, April 12). Across UW System, campuses reduce courses, advising and jobs as budget cuts take hold. Wisconsin State Journal. https:// madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/across-uw-system-cam puses-reduce-courses-advising-and-jobs-as/article_4e691a26-3930-557ca8a9-c7ddb10b623d.html. Schneider, P. (2014, April 28). Since 2004, UW-Madison tuition increased at a greater rate for Wisconsin residents. The Capital Times. https://madison. com/ct/news/local/writers/pat_schneider/since-uw-madison-tuition-increa sed-at-a-greater-rate-for/article_7b7de704-ceda-11e3-b2eb-0019bb2963f4. html. Sobol, N. L. (2017). Targeted fines & fees against low income minorities: Civil rights & constitutional implications: Testimony before the us commission on civil rights. Available at SSRN 2971214. Stange, K. (2015). Differential pricing in undergraduate education: Effects on degree production by field. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 34(1), 107–135. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.21803. UW System Board of Regents. (2019). Tuition and fee policies for credit instruction. https://www.wisconsin.edu/uw-policies/uw-system-adm inistrative-policies/tuition-and-fee-policies-for-credit-instruction/. Whatley, M. (2017). Financing study abroad: An exploration of the influence of financial factors on student study abroad patterns. Journal of Studies in International Education, 21(5), 431–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/102831 5317697798. Wolniak, G., George, C., & Nelson, G. (2018). The emerging differential tuition era among US public universities. Under pressure (pp. 191–214). Boston, MA: Brill Sense.

CHAPTER 4

The True Costs of Living Expenses

Abstract The vast majority of first-year college students at four-year universities are required to opt into the on-campus food and housing systems. This arrangement should ensure that students’ basic needs are affordably met so that they can transition into college life and focus on their academic and social growth. However, in an environment where universities must ensure their own survival, food, and housing have become profit-making opportunities, with students as their consumers. This approach to providing food and housing causes insecurities and inequalities, especially for low-income students, rather than assuring students’ health and well-being. Keywords Food insecurity · Housing insecurity · Meal plans

Introduction This chapter explores how the costs of living while in college— housing, dining, transportation, and more—create social inequities on college campuses that further marginalize already vulnerable students. We examine on-campus housing and dining options—the largest expenses for students who live on campus—and also examine the true costs of living off campus. While many students and their families start college believing that living off campus will be more affordable, the realities of off-campus © The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_4

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living also end up posing significant (and, at times, significantly greater) financial, social, and academic risks, particularly to students without a safety net. In this chapter, we argue that, whether they live on- or off campus, students generally experience much higher than expected costs for living expenses, and this impacts students’ financial, social, academic, and emotional well-being. This chapter pays particular attention to the forms of housing, food, and related insecurities that are made worse by campus policies (e.g., policies that result in students who commute from home lacking access to financial aid to cover food costs that their on-campus peers maintain access to; or policies that result in students who live on campus regularly running out of meal points before the end of the semester), and the consequences of these policies on low-income students’ lives and academic trajectories. A bystander can easily imagine, through narratives promoted by university marketing campaigns and in popular media representations, that public universities in the United States provide students with at least adequate access to on-campus living conditions, chief among them food, housing, and other basic requirements like transportation. Further, these services are usually assumed to be affordable, compared to off-campus living, while functioning to “level the playing field” by introducing a diverse community of students to a shared living arrangement. On certain campuses, in certain spaces, this may be true, but we found such examples to be exceptions, not the rule. The true costs of living (and in particular the costs associated with on-campus housing and food) were often unexpectedly high, in part because they may be purposefully obscured by university policies and officials and the systems they guard, and in part because campuses are often now tasked with covering their own costs or creating a surplus. This logic is, in policy and practice, often opposed to students’ well-being. Living expenses amount to over 50% of total college costs on the typical four-year campus (Kelchen, Goldrick-Rab, & Hosch, 2017; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2015), yet generally the policies and practices that govern these expenses are receiving limited attention from researchers and policymakers, despite a growing body of research pointing to the many different ways in which students are struggling to maintain access to basic needs while enrolled as a student (e.g., Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, & Hernandez, 2017).

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Research and literature on campus dining services, for example, are preoccupied with efficiency, waste, and sustainability (Chen, Arendt, & Gregoire, 2010), and providing students with tools for managing their own expenditures (Sankaran, Mulroney, & Corcoran, 2016). These literatures reflect a significant shift in the underlying logic of campus services for students. Historically, there was often an assumption made that colleges were acting as students’ parents—and that, therefore, food, housing, and other aspects of the daily living environment would and should be healthy, safe, comprehensive, and fully provided by the university, as any parent who is able to would provide for their child.1 Particularly since the 1960s, the logic of colleges as in loco parentis has been challenged from many sides and has been legally undermined. In place of this metaphor has arisen a wide range of laws and alternative metaphors governing the relationship between a college and its students (Bickel & Lake, 1996). One of the most powerful and pernicious has been that of the student as a consumer and the “college experience” as the product. This particular logic ruled the universities and most of the offices that were charged with managing students’ housing, food, transportation, and other basic living expenses. As a result, these services and students’ basic needs were recast as products that the university should sell to students as series of cascading choices. As consumers, students could “choose” to buy more or less expensive housing or meal options, they could “choose” whether they had the time to go to a full-service cafeteria instead of the “grab n’ go” gas station cafeteria model adopted by colleges (at least in part because the profit margins were much higher and the labor costs much lower); and they could “choose” whether to pay extra money to access living-learning communities, gyms, or kitchens in their dormitories. Some have argued that the consumer logic puts students in charge and expands their choices; as we note throughout this book, that may be true for wealthier students, but it was not the case for the lowerincome students with whom we worked. For them, these “choices” were no choices at all, but instead regularly resulted in it often costing them more to still get less than wealthier students. This approach to imagining the student-college relationship was not specifically built with the intended outcome of student debt, but it was 1 As Lee (2011) describes, the history and concept of in loco parentis have always had a dark side as well—one deeply restrictive of students’ constitutional rights, for example.

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built with the intended outcome of shifting costs from the university to consumers—even when this new logic left students without food, without housing, without a right to claim access to their basic needs from the institution that they were attending. And universities, in turn, found themselves in a double-bind: with public funding constantly shrinking, they had to find new ways to directly extract resources from students, their families, and the loans to which they had access. Most students on the four campuses where we worked were forced to live and eat on campus during their first year. For universities looking to assure solvency as tuition stagnated and public funds declined, they were a captive consumer audience from whom, at a minimum, the universities expected to cover their costs in providing basic services. This chapter is broken into two major sections: housing and food. We detail the official cost estimates at each of our four campuses and examine how the universities talked about living costs. We then uncover the hidden—or, to be more blunt, true—costs of these aspects of collegegoing as they were experienced by the first- and second-year students in our study, living both on- and off campus.

The True Costs of Housing Official Policies and Cost Estimates College campuses rely on internal estimates to calculate both on- and offcampus living expenses, but our colleagues’ analyses indicate that as many as 50% of colleges are as much as 20% off in these estimates (Kelchen et al., 2017). Some of these misestimations simply reflect the difference between any estimate and people’s individual experiences. Others, however, are systematic: for a number of different reasons, colleges may try to “game” these costs, inflating them or deflating them based on logics that have little to do with most students’ needs, wants, or experiences (e.g., New, 2015), or they may be constrained by Federal guidelines that misperceive some students’ actual costs (e.g., students living with family members [The Institute for College Access and Success, 2016]). For a wide range of reasons, then, students may find that the true costs of living expenses vary significantly from the COA estimate of living expenses. Each of the four universities in this study enacted unique, campusspecific policies governing student food and housing. Food and housing policies significantly impact both the “official” advertised prices and the

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true costs that students will experience when living on campus. They also determine when and what costs students may experience living off campus. Students entering their first year of college are expected to utilize these on- and off-campus price estimates to determine how much attending the university would cost them, and how much they could save by making various food and housing decisions. These advertised price estimates also impact students’ access to financial aid, and a misplaced estimate can mean in reality either unnecessary but unrecognized additional debt or additional, unmet need. The four universities had quite different official cost estimates for onand off-campus housing. The official estimates for on-campus housing ranged from a high of $8800 at BU to a low of $4000 at GSU. Both RSU and GLU sat somewhere in the middle, with on-campus housing estimates at $7300 and $6300, respectively. And while the range across campuses was quite high, so too could be the range of advertised prices within each campus. No campus had a single official cost estimate, because each campus had a range of housing options that differed in price. On average, there was a 36% difference in the cost of the least-expensive versus the most-expensive housing option on campus.2 For example, the full range of on-campus housing prices at BU was between a low of $7300 and a high of $9300, while the full range of housing prices at GSU was from a low of $4000 to a high of $5700. Three of the four universities required first-year students to live on campus; only BU did not (though over 90% of first-year students chose to live on campus, and BU had the lowest percentage of commuter students among the four universities). GSU also required that students live on campus for their second year. The on-campus housing options available for students at each university were generally diverse, both in terms of the type of housing provided (e.g., one-student studios, “traditional” two-student rooms, four-student suites) and in the price (and quality) of housing options. And, as discussed in detail below, on-campus housing options were increasingly cost-differentiated and privatized, which had ripple effects on students’ experiences. The COA estimates for off-campus living were less clear. Two of the four universities did not present specific price estimates for living off campus, though RSU provided students with a “commuter” price estimate. A lack of official off-campus estimates was particularly problematic

2 Not including deposits and learning community fees.

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for students who chose to commute from home during their first year of college, as they usually did not have access to financial aid that accurately represented their living expenses. Of the three universities that did present on- and off-campus (or commuter) housing cost estimates separately, RSU estimated a lower housing cost for commuting, GLU estimated the same housing prices for living on- or off campus, and BU estimated a higher housing price for living off campus. In practice, students reported that off-campus living costs were consistently lower than living on campus, but the official cost estimates often translated into financial aid packages that failed to meet even this lower need. On-Campus Housing Most students were required to live on campus during their first year. Their COA accounted for this through one flat cost estimate for oncampus housing. But universities are increasingly adopting a consumer choice model when deciding how to develop their services. In terms of housing options, all of the campuses were building or had recently built new dormitories. All of the new builds were priced on the high end of the housing continuum, reflecting a national trend (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2015). The new builds on some campuses also reflected a national movement toward campusadjacent, public-private partnerships between universities and privatelyowned management companies. The new housing constructions more often than not included services and amenities that older, campus-bound housing constructions did not have (e.g., ADA compliant, resident-only dining services, coffee houses, meeting and study rooms, air conditioning, exercise facilities, Living Learning Communities). In other words, even as a greater number of low-income students entered the college system, these public universities were expanding their stock of more expensive, not less expensive, housing options for students, while shifting the responsibilities of management and oversight into private, for-profit hands. As housing options and their amenities are increasingly costdifferentiated, students who pay the least, get the least. University housing policies de facto exclude some students from specific services by only including these services in more-expensive housing options. For example, GLU connects housing to academics via their residence-based Living Learning Communities (LLCs). Though promoted in public documents as requiring no additional cost, many of the LLCs are in fact

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located in the most-expensive residence halls. The most-expensive doubleoccupancy option on campus houses five of the campus’s LLCs. Thus, while there is no specific, additional cost for participating in one of these LLCs, the actual cost in additional dormitory fees was thousands of dollars a year. Similarly, at GSU, many of the LLCs are in moreexpensive residence halls, and most of the low-cost residence halls are not ADA compliant. Students who require physically accessible residence halls (and similarly accessible residence hall amenities, such as cooking and laundry facilities), are forced into more-expensive buildings; and, in some situations are unable to even enter and socialize with friends in the low-cost halls, which have not been upgraded to be made accessible. Thus, the differentiation in on-campus housing costs means that low- and moderate-income students sometimes cannot afford to access the more expensive academic, food, and other dorm-based programs (e.g., LLCs) and services (e.g., mini-gyms) offered by the universities to their students. For some students with physical disabilities, this differentiation has serious effects on affordability and their college experience. Returning to the notion of students as consumers, the students with whom we worked had a choice about which dormitory to live in and what amenities they wanted, in theory, but the options actually available to them were usually limited. None of the students with whom we worked—save one student at GSU—chose a more-expensive dorm to live in, because they simply could not afford to do so. They did not have enough grant aid to cover these higher costs, and they were not willing or able to go into more debt or take on more work hours to live in a more expensive dorm. And this meant they did not have access to the Living Learning Communities, the better gyms, the air conditioning, and the kitchens of the newer builds. It also meant that many of the dormitories were, de facto, class-segregated. Despite living in the lower-cost dorms, students reported that their experiences of actual housing costs while on campus were commonly hundreds of dollars above the official cost estimates. For the few students with whom we worked who were assigned to the more expensive dormitories even after requesting the lower-cost dorms, the higher bills they received were much higher than official living expenses estimates and had serious repercussions for their financial well-being and, therefore, their academic survival.

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Neither commonplace assumptions of how college housing works nor official estimates of housing costs reflected the realities of students’ experienced housing costs. When first beginning college, most students who were living on campus described campus housing as a reliable and “all inclusive” college experience, leading them to initially report that they felt that living on campus gave them more time to focus on what was important for them to succeed in college (e.g., academics, extracurriculars, etc.). Utilities, such as an Internet connection, were included in oncampus housing fees, which meant students did not have to take care of multiple, and potentially fluctuating, bills for different services. They did not have to negotiate repairs with rental companies (though on-campus maintenance was not necessarily timely or reliable). They started the year believing their meals were paid for through the food plans they were required to buy. Moreover, they felt like they were part of the campus community, readily able to participate in campus events. Reflecting findings from previous research (e.g., U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2015), fewer students who were living on campus expressed feelings of isolation or loneliness, compared to students in the study who were living at home or off campus. Once students were well into their first year, however, the great majority who were living in campus housing began to report a steady stream of unexpected costs. As these unexpected costs continued, students began to view their relationship with the university as unfair and transactional, if not outright misleading and exploitative. As examples, students at RSU began the year by receiving notice that they had to buy $300 of bedding from one particular company in order to have bedding compatible with their supplied dorm mattresses, and they were also ordered to deposit an unexpected $100 “first year dorm fee.” Some students at GSU found themselves paying for a room but having to live in communal floor lounges because of the university’s habitual overbooking of residence halls, conditioned in part by the university’s policy of requiring students to live on campus for two years and in part by the university’s high stop-out rates over the course of students’ first semester. And while students at GSU indicated their residence hall preferences, some students were placed in more expensive residence halls than they could afford. This was one among several reasons that many students reported a year-long pattern of roommate shuffling. GSU also upcharged students as if they were living in a single unit if their dormitory roommate left-placing the burden on the student whose roommate left to find a new

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one or leave the room for another shared space. In contrast, students placed into the most-expensive residence hall, managed by an off-campus business, found themselves unable to break their contract once they arrived on campus; they could transfer into it anytime throughout the academic year but could not move out, and thus were stuck with greater housing costs than anticipated. Student usually experienced unexpected housing charges from the moment they checked in until their last day on campus. Many students encountered fees for failing to check out properly at the end of the year. Few knew the bureaucratic ins and outs, and this information seemed to be absent in residence halls. Students could face very high fines for “damage” to their rooms on move-out day. It quickly became shared knowledge at GSU, for instance, that a collection of funds for spackle and paint from a local hardware store would save an entire floor from unseemly fees. Across the universities, students described the on-campus housing experience as increasingly and unexpectedly costly, colored by fees that seemed both unnecessary and, at times, unavoidable. For the worst hit, such as students locked into an expensive residence hall contract, these unexpected costs totaled up to thousands of dollars. Some students found themselves in situations where they were unable to afford living on campus even if required to do so. We worked with students at BU who were struggling with housing insecurity, sneaking perfume samples from magazines to cover up that they hadn’t been able to shower or wash their clothes in weeks. At GSU, a student named Sawyer, a transitioning male in his first year, was unable to safely live in a male dormitory and had become relationally and financially estranged from his family. He lied to the university, claiming to be commuting from home, and lied to his family, claiming to be living on campus, all the while renting a room in a house near campus in which he felt safe. He lived in constant worry of being found out, not as a transitioning male individual, but as a first-year student living off campus; he could not afford, either financially or otherwise, to be forced into one of the situations the university’s policies demanded. Over the course of their first year on campus, the stream of unanticipated housing fees led most of the low-income students involved in the research who were not required to live on campus for a second year to decide that on-campus housing was unaffordable. For example, students at RSU who had lived on campus their first year were, by Summer, much

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less certain of whether they could or should continue living on campus. Some students’ concerns were exacerbated by learning that they would experience a decrease in the financial aid they were receiving as they lost grants reserved for first-year students only. Their resources also tightened as on-campus housing rates and fees increased. As a result, none of the focal students remained living on campus if they were not required to do so. Off-Campus Housing Off-campus housing options differ significantly across campuses, in part because rental markets were so varied, in part because students’ exact off-campus arrangements were so varied, and in part because costs of transportation to campus were so different from campus to campus and student to student. The assumptions universities make when estimating off-campus housing prices reflect several errors. Off-campus housing encompasses a diverse set of living situations: students live alone, with classmates or friends, with partners, and with parents or relatives. The distance from off-campus housing to the central campus varies, as does the ease of transportation to and from campus. Some students are able to broker living situations in which they pay little or no rent; others have to pay significant rental fees. Some campuses are surrounded by very expensive housing stock, others have lower-cost (and lower-quality) options, and still others have affordable student options. Across all of these situations, though, in the off-campus housing market, low- and moderate-income students’ options are systematically constrained by their limited finances. They often have to live further from campus and in more decrepit housing than their wealthier peers, and their access to personal transportation is often less, constraining the locations from which they can affordably commute to campus, to work, and to access basic living needs like a grocery or laundromat. Although there was great variability, students generally reported that their experienced costs for off-campus housing were lower than for on-campus housing, even after accounting for utilities. This led many students to feel that they needed to move off campus to make college more affordable, even if they preferred to stay on campus. In important ways, however, students’ stories of their experiences off-campus revealed

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that moving off campus often posed financial, social, and academic risks, particularly to students with little financial safety net. At GSU, for example, a student named Faith lived off campus with her five-year-old son and they attempted to survive off her financial aid, her annual tax refund, and a small income from her part-time work at a livein care facility, but only when she had a working car. She regularly had to choose between gas or electricity bills in the winter months, and often opted to rely on electricity with an arrangement of space heaters in case her gas was shut off. When Faith did come into a bit of money, she would often pay her rent for several months in advance “just in case,” and all the while she struggled to complete her required coursework for graduation because specific required courses often conflicted with times of the day or week she either had to work or care for her son. She struggled with depression and feelings of hopelessness in this situation, sometimes to the point of having friends take turns following her on 24-hour watch cycles. In all of this, she found the university to be more of an uncaring adversary than a resource or support service, in part because the institution did not appear to be able to fully appreciate her dire financial situation, or the schedule restrictions that she and other students who had to work long hours faced. Students who lived off campus in student housing markets faced risks associated with rental agreements that could result in sudden and large housing fees that could not be easily disputed. Predatory landlords were commonplace in majority-student rental markets across all universities, and students were aware of this risk. Many chalked it up as a necessary evil to avoid the nickel-and-diming housing structure on campus or to move into housing that was significantly cheaper. Students’ experiences of off-campus housing were strongly shaped by the rental markets that existed around each campus, and common norms and practices governing renter-landlord relations. At BU, for example, students reported high hidden costs (e.g., very high deductions from security deposits and for move-out cleaning fees) and often negative relationships with landlords. Because it was still generally cheaper than living on campus, most students in the study felt they had to live off campus. But they had to navigate difficult relations with landlords, not to mention that they had to save money as upfront capital for credit checks, safety deposits, utilities, Internet, activation fees, furnishings, and other shared household items. They also had to trust their roommates to be ready with their share of the costs on time. Students usually were aware of some of

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these costs, but they were often unprepared for how large they were, and how difficult it could be to cover them when many other college costs came due at the same time (e.g., class registration, and textbook fees). There were also complications caused by when, where, and how students obtained necessities like furnishings (which were at least sparsely provided in on-campus housing). For students at more rural universities or whose families lived far from the campus where they attended school, the practical realities of arranging transportation to get furnishings could be quite difficult, but buying new furnishings was usually not possible. Students often tried to lower costs by getting furniture from relatives and friends, but this was usually only a partial solution that caused its own complications. For example, if they brought their furniture from home, students often did not have access to a bed, desk, and other necessities when they visited or went home for the summer. Several of the students spent their summers living out of a duffle bag on a parent’s or grandparent’s couch because their bed remained in off-campus housing. Off-campus housing also came with shared living costs that “all inclusive” on-campus housing did not. Complicated social negotiations with roommates often ensued over how much each person in the housing unit owed for social expenses, food, the unexpectedly high costs of shared toiletries and cleaning supplies, and other shared costs. In other words, low-income college students were struggling, and sometimes failing, to pay for even basic hygiene products while living off campus. In contrast to these experiences of precarity, unexpected expenses, and fraught negotiations with roommates over funds, wealthy students with whom we worked generally either continued to live on campus their entire college career (often in the most-expensive university dormitories); moved to high-end off-campus housing (often newly built apartment complexes) where they lived with other wealthy friends; or in some cases, lived in houses bought by their parents as investments, with their parents paying the mortgage. Expectations about what it means to be a college student in America often take the form of a tripartite relationship of costs—financial, academic, and social—that only the wealthiest can easily afford to balance. Keeping up with the basic and monthly costs of off-campus living translates into overtime labor roles in the summer and part-time employment during the academic year that impeded lower-income students’ academic and socializing efforts. In practice, most students in the study were forced to focus on no more than two of the three (financial, academic, and

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social), most with a constant feeling they were missing out on aspects of the university experience that, while easily dismissed as extracurricular, were also the spaces in which many college students were building friendships, finding romantic partners, exploring their spirituality, networking for future career opportunities, building their own leadership experiences, and so forth. Thus, even when off-campus living meant financial savings, these savings came with new costs—be they higher transportation and increased isolation, increased stress and anxiety, or a declining sense of connection to the campus and the growth they expected to experience there. Commuting from Home Students could face a shortfall of financial aid relative to the price of off-campus housing due to inaccuracies in the estimations produced by financial aid offices (Kelchen, Hosch, & Goldrick-Rab, 2014); this error was felt most painfully by students opting to commute from home, as some offices did not specify a commuter cost and others assumed that they had no living expenses if commuting from home. However, students in the study—as with students nationally—often paid rent (and sometimes food and other costs) when living with relatives (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2015). This estimate is incorrect, and it has real consequences in access to financial aid. Students who commute from home obviously need food while off and on campus and, in fact, report finding themselves cut off from family food, being asked to pay rent, or finding their family needs them to use financial aid refunds to help pay household bills. Others faced significant time costs as they helped with childcare, housekeeping, and other familial obligations and labor roles. For example, Betty was an RSU student who lived on campus her first year; she moved about 20 minutes off campus her second year to live with her aunt and younger sister. She moved to her aunt’s house because she received less financial aid in her second year than in her first. The decrease in financial aid was due to her estrangement from her mother during her first semester of college; when she filed her FAFSA for the second year, she was forced to use her father’s information. He had a much higher income than her mother, but did not provide any money to support his children. Betty moved to her aunt’s house to try to save enough money to make up for this decline in financial aid; however, when she moved in, she learned that her aunt expected her pay for her sister’s expenses

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(e.g., food, clothes, furniture). To cope, she took to working two jobs, clocking in more than 40 hours a week in total. This significantly affected her academic performance. Paige, a student at GSU, began college commuting from her stepfather’s farm, as she believed it would be her least-expensive option; but her stepfather told her when she turned 18 that she was only allowed to eat food from the house if she bought it herself. Without financial aid to afford a meal plan on campus, she worked full-time at a local gas station until 11 p.m. each night, saving enough money to eat one meal per day while remaining a full-time student. Students also reported that there were compounding emotional and relational costs caused by commuting. Some students experienced tensions with family members, whose expectations for students’ roles and responsibilities in the home did not always match students’ expectations or capacities to engage with familial life while in college. Both universities and governmental financial aid institutions assume a high level of coherence and the communal nature of familial relationships. These, again, do not match the reality of many students’ familial situations, and the assumption that parents willingly provide room and board to their children, that parents listed on FAFSA documents do indeed cut checks to match expected financial contributions, that students living at home face no additional demands on their time or money, carry sometimes unbearable consequences in the realities of students’ lives. Students also found that transportation costs to campus were much higher than estimated in the transportation official estimates—which at some schools did not differentiate between commuter students and students living off campus. Yet, commuter students must often drive long distances and pay additional costs in parking, vehicle maintenance, gas, insurance, and other costs. For Lupe, a commuter student at GLU, an additional hidden cost to commuting was time. Although he chose to live off campus with his family to save money, he didn’t anticipate that, on top of paying for parking, he would often have to spend time searching for parking. Lupe usually arrived on campus early each morning, but on days when he came a bit later, he had to either spend at least half an hour searching for parking, or park at a distant lot a couple miles off campus and then take the school shuttle to campus. This process cost him hours of time each week, in an already tight class and work schedule. To be sure, students living at home may be able to get away with lowor no-cost transportation from and to campus. But, transportation costs

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did not only relate to commuting to school. Most low-income students also worked jobs while going to college. For those who were commuting or living at home, these jobs were almost always off campus and often required a car to drive to. Indeed, a car in working order was in some cases a deciding factor in surviving college; many students reported they prioritized vehicle maintenance over other costs, including food, bills, and even tuition. For example, Paddy, a student at GSU, needed a working car to get to his job, and he needed his job to pay for college. When his car died during his first year, he opted to spend his earnings on a used car and transferred from GSU to a two-year community college closer to home, because the cost of the car made it impossible to cover his tuition. To him, it was a decision without alternatives—he needed a car to work, and he needed to work to pay for any college option. Housing in College: No Good Options The question of trading off the quality and cost of housing for other outcomes, as these examples show, is complex for many students, and often runs counter to university narratives about the costs of attendance. Indeed, students regularly described trying to weigh and balance tradeoffs (financial, emotional, physical safety, social, familial, work, and academic) among different housing options. The majority of focal students across all four campuses said that they felt that on-campus housing improved most outcomes except the financial ones. The cost of on-campus housing was so high, though, that most low-income students did not feel they could stay on campus, even though they recognized these benefits. Managing the complicated trade-off of being in suitable housing— where students feel safe, connected, and able to focus on academics— and of being in affordable housing—where students feel that costs are manageable without detracting too much from a focus on academics— was one of the greatest pressures faced by focal students during their first and into their second year of college.

The True Costs of Food As an increasing number of studies have shown, college students face higher levels of food insecurity than the general population. The myth of the “starving college student” is neither a joke nor an exaggeration, and food insecurity has significant, negative impacts on college

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students’ academic performance, sleep, mental and physical health, and social health (El Zein et al., 2019; Henry, 2017). Yet, as Patton-López, López-Cevallos, Cancel-Tirado, and Vazquez (2014) note, food insecurity does not seem to be taken very seriously as a major academic or health threat to college students. A number of large-scale surveys have attempted to estimate levels of four-year college student food insecurity (e.g., Broton & Goldrick-Rab, 2016; Gaines, Robb, Knol, & Sickler, 2014; Patton-López et al., 2014; Twill, Bergdahl, & Fensler, 2016) and generally find that college student food insecurity is higher—sometimes double or triple—the general public rate of food insecurity (11.1% in 2017, according to Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, & Singh, 2018). A smaller number of studies have used more ethnographic approaches to learn from students about their daily experiences of food insecurity (e.g., Henry, 2017; Watson, Malan, Glik, & Martinez, 2017). Notably, while many studies focus on students’ risk factors, there have been few studies that attempt to understand how college policies and practices—and particularly policies and practices related to the nowcommon university budgetary model of attempting to cover all costs or make money off of food services—impacts students’ experiences of food insecurity. When university policies and practices are discussed, studies almost always focus on small-scale efforts that universities can undertake to redistribute food (e.g., by making food that would otherwise be thrown away available to food-insecure students, allowing students to donate meals to other students, opening a campus food pantry, etc.). Students in our study, like students in Watson et al.’s (2017) study, faced higher-than-expected food costs during college. When living on campus, costs were higher than expected because meal plans functioned in practice to: (a) limit students’ ability to claim all of their meal plan dollars, and (b) increase the additional funds students have to spend to get a full meal. As Chuck, a student at GSU, described these hidden costs: “I thought ‘I have 175 meal points; that will get me 175 meals.’ Yeah, right.” Students living off campus also often faced unexpectedly high costs as well—both because they often had to pay more than they expected for food at home, and because they often struggled to buy food on campus or bring in prepared food from home to last them throughout the day. As a result, many of the lowest-income students—whether living on- or off campus—found themselves facing food insecurity at some point

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during the academic year. This insecurity was often highest at the end of semesters or the academic year, right when major exams were occurring. Official Policies and Cost Estimates Much like housing, one can easily conjure common images of college students surrounded by food options—perhaps most of them junk, but all of them accessible. Yet food is one of the areas in which students reported the highest disparity between advertised prices and experienced costs, and for which the repercussions of hidden costs were perhaps clearest. Students on all campuses were required to have meal plans if they lived on campus, and they could choose to have a meal plan if they lived off campus. Meal plans, most students quickly learned, were a scam. Each campus sets out official cost estimates that include the cost of food, but this cost can be difficult to parse out as it is often entangled in other cost estimates or categorized in a confusing manner. More importantly, this estimate is often not reflective of real costs in dramatic ways. At RSU, for example, the on-campus food estimates ranged from $2800 to $3300, and the off-campus estimate was listed at $900, but this, in fact, was the cost of an optional on campus plan for commuter students. The estimate was $0 for students who commuted from home. At BU, the official cost estimates were embedded in the official housing estimates, at $8800 for on-campus students and $9700 for off-campus students; the estimate was $0 for students who commuted from home. At GLU, there was an across-the-board official cost estimate of $3700 for students on campus, off campus, and who commuted from home. At GSU, the official cost estimates were between $2900 and $3400 for oncampus students; $1800–$2100 for an optional meal plan for off-campus students; and $1000–$1400 for an optional meal plan for students who commuted from home. GSU had perhaps the most opaque and exploitative system and will be more carefully detailed as an example of real food costs below. The True Costs of On-Campus Meal Plans Most students across all campuses described on-campus meal plans as having significant hidden costs; they also appeared to be one of the most consistent mechanisms through which colleges made money off of students. Our calculations indicate that campus food markups appeared

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to be well over 100% at most campuses, even in situations where students were getting the most for their money. (This estimate is not far off from Mathewson’s [2017] estimate of a 70–85% cost markup for college meals). Furthermore, all meal plans included administrative fees that were often hidden from students; for example, GLU applied an administrative fee to all plans—$770 in 2014/2015, and $810 in 2015/2016. Because of the lack of clarity in billing and online information systems, GLU students often believed that this fee was part of their meal plan and could be applied to food purchases. At RSU, the cheapest meal plan cost $1400; however, this plan provided only $1080 in meal plan dollars. The $320 difference was not accounted for in university documents. Furthermore, the rules surrounding the use of meal points or dollars on all campuses were often complicated and not easy to find. Price systems related to time, location, and food item type often interacted to determine the exact cost of a meal for a student, making it difficult for students to estimate how much they would be able to buy with a given meal plan until they knew their schedules and learned how to maximize their meal plan. By the time they had this knowledge, it was often too late to change meal plans or course schedules without accruing additional costs. And, as Allen (2019) also found in his study, while universities made money off of all students who had meal plans, they disproportionately made the most money off of students who had the least to spend. The fewer dollars that a student could pay up front for a year-long meal plan, the less food the student got for their dollar. This was especially true at GSU, where we found the most blatantly inequitable dining system. Below, we highlight the dining system at GSU to explain how students experienced meal plans, and how university policies and systems made it hard for students—and particularly hard for low-income students—to get all of the food for which they paid. Though we are highlighting a campus that was more aggressive in treating food services as a profitmaking enterprise than some other campuses, the consumer logics, types of issues students faced in accessing food, and the resulting inequalities that students faced were similar on all other campuses in our study. Meal Plans at GSU. All students who lived on campus at GSU were required to purchase a meal plan. Students and staff commonly described the meal plans as at best confusing and at worst a scam, and this was for good reason: the dining system appeared to be set up to make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for students to translate their meal plan into enough food to make it through the year.

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Table 4.1 Traditional versus block meal plans

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Traditional

Block

19 Meal Points/Wk $1595 = $5.25/Pt 14 Meal Points/Wk + $50 flex $1555 = $6.70/Pt

200Pt + $100 flex $1690 = $7.95/Pt 175Pt + $100 flex $1580 = $8.46/Pt 150Pt + $100 flex $1470 = $9.13/Pt

GSU had a range of meal plans, categorized into “traditional” or “block” plans. Table 4.1 details the meal plans available for first and second-year students who lived on campus, broken down by the type of plan, the advertised cost, and the amount students paid to purchase each meal point. All meal plans except the 19-point “traditional” plan included both “meal points” and “dining dollars.” The meal point was the standard unit of exchange when buying a meal, but its value fluctuated depending on whether it was used during breakfast ($3.75), lunch ($4.75), or dinner ($5.50) hours. Meal points were supposed to equal one meal. But the value of a meal point only equaled a meal when a student could make it to the single, limited-hour, all-you-care-to-eat facility on campus. Otherwise, at all of the a la carte facilities, a meal point almost always only covered part of the cost of a meal. The most popular meal plan, which was the plan most students were encouraged to purchase, was the Block Plan of 175 meal points, with an additional $100 in flex “dining dollars.” Dining dollars worked like a gift card: the $100 could be used in most stores on campus, and students used their dining dollars to make up the cost of a meal that was not covered by the value of their meal point. There was a significant difference between what students paid for each meal point and how much money they actually had to spend on a meal. For example, students with the 175 Block Plan paid the university $8.46 for a meal point, but were allocated at the most $5.50 to spend (for dinner), or at the least $3.75 (for breakfast) in exchange for the one meal point. How much money students were losing depended on the amount that students initially paid for the meal points; this also fluctuated, depending on the meal plan they could afford to buy and that fit their academic and work schedules. A small, pre-made salad at GSU had a sticker price of $7.00, but students on the 175 Block meal plan paid

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a real cost of up to $10.71 if they tried to purchase the salad during a lunch period: they initially paid $8.46 for their meal point, but since they only receive $4.75 in spendable money for that meal point, they had to pay an additional $2.25 in dining dollars to make up the difference and buy the $7.00 salad. Almost all GSU students whom we interviewed skipped breakfast, waiting until the lunch period started at 10:30 a.m. so that their meal point would have the higher lunch-time cash equivalency. They purchased inexpensive, unhealthy snack foods (such as sugar-laden cereal bars) from the local Walmart to get them to lunch. Students on block meal plans commonly used two meal points at dinner, trying to purchase enough food to have leftovers to get them through to the next meal they could afford the following day. Students who chose a Traditional meal plan faced unique hurdles. These plans provided a specific number of meal points per week; these points did not accrue or roll over. For example, a 19-point plan coincided with every meal period throughout a week; to use them all, a student had to always be on campus and never have a scheduling conflict. If a student missed a meal period (say, if they went home for a weekend), they simply lost that meal point and GSU absorbed the cost of the lost meal as if it were a fee. In effect, this meant that students paid the university for the privilege to go off campus to work, or stay in a dorm room and order a pizza to eat with friends, or visit home. Students who had to work jobs while attending college simply could not make the most of these plans; while a few students in the study initially opted for a traditional meal plan at the start of their first year (because it appeared to give them a bigger “bang for their buck”), after experiencing its overwhelming hidden costs they all switched to the 175-meal block plan. But plan changes came with their own additional fees: students could switch plans before the start of the semester free of charge, but once the semester started (and students gained the experiential knowledge to make informed decisions about their meal purchasing) there was a $10 fee to change and a minimum $25 charge to cancel a plan. Students who withdrew from campus after 12 weeks were not refunded their unused meal plan money. Students who could only afford the least-expensive meal plan option had the lowest purchasing power and paid the university the most money for the same food. Moreover, lesser plans only provided enough meal points to cover about two meals per weekday, and none on weekends, but the plans cost much more than it would have cost students to make their own meals. They were in a catch-22. They were required to buy the

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costly meal plan, but it did not cover their food needs and did not leave them enough money to make their own food. As was also the case with housing, then, at GSU and across all of the campuses, the meal plan that costs the least for students also offered the fewest perks—though none were as brazenly inequitable as GSU charges. The extent to which students could not avoid paying more money and/or losing meal points was not entirely accidental: an administrative staff member proudly pointed out that the campus dining service was a multi-million-dollar business, bringing much-needed income into the campus budget. In practice, this business model meant that lower-income and working students paid a greater percentage into the campus’ profitmaking food venture. The discrepancies between what students paid for their meal plans and what they were allocated by the university were inequitable, and in practice acted as a sort of “poor tax.” Students in our study, like those in Watson et al.’s (2017) study, recognized this inequity and questioned how the university could “rip them off” as it was doing by setting up a food system that left them regularly hungry. The most common mechanisms through which students lost money to the universities through the meal plans included limited hours and inconvenient locations at which meal plan points or dollars could be used; significantly higher markups on certain high-demand meals or food items (including most fresh food options); rollover plans that benefitted the universities; and, overall high markups on all food options available to students. In contrast to the few students who struggled to spend down their meal plan money so as not to lose it to the university, toward the end of the Spring semester, many students across the four campuses did not anticipate having enough money to pay for their remaining meals. Students rationed food, turned to friends and family to help pay for food, searched for free meal events on and near campus, and in the case of students at two campuses, visited food pantries (one campus pantry and one off-campus pantry). This finding links together three literatures on food insecurity that are not currently talking to each other in a generative manner. One literature examines the causes of student food insecurity and largely focuses on students’ “risk factors” (e.g., Gaines et al., 2014). A second (smaller) literature focuses on students’ responses to food insecurity and outlines many of the same findings described in this chapter (e.g., Henry, 2017; Watson et al., 2017). And a third literature examines potential educational and institutional responses to food insecurity, largely focusing on

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redistributional systems that do not challenge the food services status quo (e.g., campus food pantries), advocating for increased financial aid, and educating students about nutrition and/or finances to improve their healthy eating habits (e.g., Brown, 2019; Bruening, Argo, Payne-Sturges, & Laska, 2017). Our findings indicate that a key cause of food insecurity among oncampus students is college food plans themselves, which cost a lot of money but do not make it easy (or sometimes, even possible) for a student to eat well on the plan. Students spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get enough food through the system, and when this does not work, come up with a wide range of low-cost, short-term responses to try to eat enough to make it through classes. This finding indicates that a root cause of students’ food insecurity while living on campus is the nature of the food system and its goals. As multiple administrators said to us, the goal of the food services system is to “sit on its own [financial] bottom” or to make a profit—not assure that each student who is paying the university for a meal plan has basic access to food each day. As with housing business models, this leads to decisions that may increase costs in order to attract wealthier students, instead of making decisions that assure that low-income students are not food insecure while paying the university for food. Student responses to the complexities of the meal plans, their common knowledge that the system is unfair, and their concern that despite the costs of their meal plan they will not have enough food to last the year, led students to adopt a range of techniques designed to “game” the meal plan system. For example, students at GLU often bought wraps, which cost less on the meal plan point, instead of food platters, which cost more. The wraps were filling in the short run, but they contained fewer calories, and in most cases less protein and vegetables, than the platters. Students at GSU went to the single all-you-care-to-eat facility when their schedules allowed, with pocketed shorts hidden under baggy sweatpants; when staff were not looking, they stuffed sandwiches and other food inside their pants so that they could eat them later, when they were out of points for the day. Using shorts and sweatpants in this way was a response to a dining hall rule, implemented to prevent students from bringing backpacks or other bags into the dining area to “steal” the food students believed they had paid for. Ironically, while the institution implemented these rules to prevent theft, the very food policies implemented by the institutions could be viewed as theft.

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Students’ responses were also limited by a range of issues that impacted them differently. For example, at GSU, the all-you-care-to-eat facility was located in one of the more expensive dorms, which was built near the engineering building, quite far away from the main campus and lowercost residence halls. The walk to the facility went through an isolated and poorly-lit forest path. The trip felt dangerous at night, and it took a long time—often too long to walk between class periods, unless your next class was in engineering, and the lack of lighting led to many female students having dangerous and threatening encounters with predatory male students, such has being followed with laser pointers trained to their bodies (as if being “hunted”) when taking the trip alone. This led many female students to avoid the only facility on campus where they could eat as much food as they needed during dinner hours. Similarly, many students who balanced long work hours and classes could not find the time to make it to the all-you-care-to-eat facility during its limited hours. These students were the most likely to only have been able to afford the most limited meal plan, and they could not even leverage the plan as much as possible by using the facility that would provide them the most food per meal point. Female student athletes, in particular, found their practice schedules—blocked later in the day after their male peers’ workouts—prevented them from accessing the one place on campus they could meet their caloric needs in a cost-effective manner. The extent of the barriers that students faced in getting the food for which they paid varied across universities. The policies and food services available to students significantly impacted the extent to which they struggled with hidden food costs. For example, Alexandria, a student from GSU, transferred to a different UW campus that was not initially part of our study between her first and second year of college. Alexandria described her access to food as immediately improving, because that campus made it much easier to afford healthy food choices (including fresh foods), and to access food when her work and class schedule allowed it. On the campuses we studied, however, food access was always an issue. The immediate problems were evident: skipped meals, overpaying, resorting to what the campus considered theft to not go hungry—or in order to access the food that students believed they had paid for—were all common issues. So were students running out of food at the end of a semester or year, and having to juggle deep food insecurity at the same time that they were trying to study and take high-stakes exams. Across the

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board, however, campuses obscured hidden costs in their dining systems, and this was a major reason that students looked to move off campus. The True Costs of Off-Campus Food As with housing costs, universities’ official cost estimates often assume similar on- and off-campus prices for food costs; or, worse, estimate that students commuting from home do not have off-campus food costs at all. As with housing, food was one of the areas in which students expected to save the most money by moving off campus, and most did. At GSU, Benny was entering her second year of college after having taken time off between graduating high school and starting her college education. As such, she had aged out of the on-campus living requirements and moved into an office space-turned-shared living space with similar housing costs to her old dormitory room. But, she could now use her limited funds, saved from living on her father’s couch and working two jobs at a combined 70 hours per week during the summers, to buy her own food. By managing her own food purchasing and cooking, she estimated that she saved around $200–$300 per month when compared with her first year of relying on the university meal plan options. These financial savings, however, came with other costs. To eat off campus, students had to spend time on meal planning and preparation. Students’ meal options were constrained by their access to transportation and to grocery stores; for example, at GLU, the closest grocery store was more than three miles from campus and required a 45-minute bus ride. At RSU, though the nearest grocery store was just over a mile from campus, there was no public transportation available for students to access it, and given students’ schedules it was often difficult to make it back and forth during a typical school day. There were usually gourmet shops and convenience stores close to or on campus (some of which were run by the universities), so students often ended up buying overpriced necessities from these stores as they waited to have the time and transportation to go to a grocery store. For some students, these new costs were unexpectedly destabilizing. For example, Betty, a student from RSU, explained that she had never cooked for herself before coming to college, and when she had to navigate this life skill without the university’s help, she found that she did not have the knowledge, skills, or time to prepare her own food effectively. As a result, she found herself eating irregularly, and when her roommate broke

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the microwave they shared, she was left with only a stove and oven to use for cooking. That might not have posed a problem for some students, but for Betty these were daunting new technologies that would take time to learn and use. Betty began skipping many of her meals. On the days she had class, she usually did not eat her first meal until three or four in the afternoon, but on the days that she worked at a nearby daycare she was able to eat a morning snack with the children. And although she had access to food stamps to help offset some of her food costs, she was embarrassed when using them at the grocery store and did so rarely.3 These students’ stories speak to the complexities that many students faced in navigating off-campus meals. Financial expenses were almost always lower than on-campus costs—or were at least easier to anticipate and make sense of—but they came with a number of additional costs, including culinary knowledge, access, cooking materials, time, and new familial and social dynamics. For many students, one or more of these requirements poses a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Conclusion Many members of the general public, university administrators, and students still assume that students who are living on campus, and who therefore have purchased meal plans and assigned dormitory rooms, could not suffer from food or housing insecurity. This is not the case. The housing and food costs that are advertised and that students anticipate, and the housing and food costs that they actually experience are varied, but students who lived on campus and had meal plans generally experienced higher costs than they expected or than were advertised. This was particularly true of their food costs; not because they were making poor choices or overeating, but because the universities’ opaque and inequitable dining systems too often charged students twice: once for the meal plan, and again for the meal itself. In so doing, the systems generated resources to support the system and—in at least some cases, knowingly—to generate a profit for the university. The “choice” that students make to restrict food intake in order to try to survive in college may impact academic, health, and psychosocial outcomes through a number of pathways, and thus likely impacts 3 Students in Henry’s (2017) and Allen’s (2019) studies reported similar feelings of shame in using such services.

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students’ success and ability to remain in college. This is also true of the stressors placed on students living on campus, who need to stay on the move to avoid paying single-occupancy fees, or who have paid for a dormitory room but are placed in the corner of an open, eight-person lounge, or who are placed in a dormitory room that they cannot afford and eventually have to move out halfway through the semester. Universities have some direct policy levers they can use to improve student food and housing security (e.g., assuring students do not lose access to meals for which they have paid; partnering with local hotels when residence halls are overbooked; building lower-cost housing options); however, issues like food (and housing) insecurity can probably best be met by redirecting universities away from profit-driven models of student consumerism and service privatization, and toward the notion that they are responsible for assuring each students’ basic needs, as a central mission of the public university.

References Allen, A. C. (2019). Study hard, eat less: Exploring food insecurity among college students. San Marcos, TX: Texas State University. Bickel, R. D., & Lake, P. F. (1996). The emergence of new paradigms in studentuniversity relations: From in loco parentis to bystander to facilitator. Journal of College and University Law, 23(4), 755–795. Broton, K., & Goldrick-Rab, S. (2016). The dark side of college (un) affordability: Food and housing insecurity in higher education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 48(1), 16–25. Brown, T. (2019). Perspectives on addressing food insecurity on college campuses, through administrators eyes: Best practices and challenges (Health Sciences Student Work). Merrimack College. https://scholarworks.merrimack.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=hsc_studentpub. Bruening, M., Argo, K., Payne-Sturges, D., & Laska, M. N. (2017). The struggle is real: A systematic review of food insecurity on postsecondary education campuses. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 117 (11), 1767– 1791. Chen, C., Arendt, S. W., & Gregoire, M. (2010). What sustainable practices exist in college and university dining services? Journal of Foodservice Management & Education, 4(1), 5–10. Coleman-Jensen, A., Rabbitt, M. P., Gregory, C. A., & Singh, A. (2018). Household food security in the United States in 2017 (Economic Research Report No. 256). Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/90023/err-256.pdf?v=0.

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El Zein, A., Shelnutt, K. P., Colby, S., Vilaro, M. J., Zhou, W., Greene, G., et al. (2019). Prevalence and correlates of food insecurity among U.S. college students: A multi-institutional study. BMC Public Health, 19(660), 1–12. Gaines, A., Robb, C. A., Knol, L. L., & Sickler, S. (2014). Examining the role of financial factors, resources and skills in predicting food security status among college students. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 38(4), 374–384. Goldrick-Rab, S., Richardson, J., & Hernandez, A. (2017, March). Hungry and homeless in college: Results from a national study of basic needs insecurity in higher education. Washington, DC: Association of Community College Trustees. https://www.acct.org/files/Publications/2017/Homeless_ and_Hungry_2017.pdf. Henry, L. (2017). Understanding food insecurity among college students: Experience, motivation, and local solutions. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 41(1), 6–19. Kelchen, R., Goldrick-Rab, S., & Hosch, B. (2017). The costs of college attendance: Examining variation and consistency in institutional living cost allowances. Journal of Higher Education, 88(6), 947–971. Lee, P. (2011). The curious life of in loco parentis at American universities. Higher Education in Review, 8, 65–90. Mathewson, T. G. (2017, January 18). A tough-to-swallow reason college keeps costing more: The price of meal plans. Hechinger Report. https://hechinger report.org/tough-swallow-reason-college-keeps-costing-price-meal-plans/. New, J. (2015, August 12). Colleges inflate full cost of attendance numbers, increasing stipends for athletes. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehig hered.com/news/2015/08/12/colleges-inflate-full-cost-attendance-num bers-increasing-stipends-athletes. Patton-López, M. M., López-Cevallos, D. F., Cancel-Tirado, D. I., & Vazquez, L. (2014). Prevalence and correlates of food insecurity among students attending a midsize rural university in Oregon. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, 46(3), 209–214. Sankaran, C., Mulroney, T., Jr., & Corcoran, D. (2016). An Exercise on creating a student expenditure basket. Journal of Economics Teaching, 1(2), 91–110. The Institute for College Access and Success. (2016, May 24). Federal cost data for students living at home are significantly understated. The Institute for College Access and Success. https://ticas.org/accountability/federal-costdata-students-living-home-are-significantly-understated/. Twill, S. E., Bergdahl, J., & Fensler, R. (2016). Partnering to build a pantry: A university campus responds to student food insecurity. Journal of Poverty, 20(3), 340–358. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (2015). Barriers to success: Housing insecurity for US college students. Washington, DC: Office of Policy Development and Research, U.S. Department of Housing and

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Urban Development. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/insight/ insight_2.pdf. Watson, T. D., Malan, H., Glik, D., & Martinez, S. M. (2017). College students identify university support for basic needs and life skills as key ingredient in addressing food insecurity on campus. California Agriculture, 71(3), 130– 138.

CHAPTER 5

The True Costs of Student Fees

Abstract All students pay fees to cover a wide range of services and amenities that are supposed to support student well-being, including healthcare, recreational facilities, student centers, student organizations, and student initiatives (such as campus food pantries). It is often assumed that these fees, which have increased rapidly over the last decade, will fund holistic, high-quality, and appropriate support for students, to which all students will have equitable access. However, this is often not the case. Juggling high academic demands, hectic work schedules, and familial responsibilities; and facing unresponsive and sometimes discriminatory services, low- and moderate-income students are too often unable to fully access what they are paying for. Keywords Student well-being · Student fees · Healthcare · Student organizations · Student centers

Introduction As each chapter in this book has argued, low- and moderate-income students in our study were struggling to survive and thrive in a public higher education system that receives fewer and fewer public dollars. As a result of these cuts, students and families face higher individual costs, and public universities have had little choice but to adopt business © The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_5

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models that have reshaped their campus cultures and generally lowered students’ access to support and services. While all students are impacted by these changes, we have provided evidence of how “class-blind” university policies often impacted wealthier versus low- and moderate-income students differently, and how university policies that were built to cater to wealthier students sometimes actively undermined low-income students’ well-being. This chapter examines one final category of the COA: student fees (or Segregated University Fees (SUF), as they are referred to in Wisconsin). SUF make up about 20% of student costs in universities across the United States and have generally increased rapidly over the last two decades.1 On the four campuses at which the study was conducted, students paid SUF that ranged from about $1000 to about $1500 a year. SUF cover a wide range of services, many of which are viewed by universities and families as expected, essential components of a student’s college experience. SUF-funded services are often described as covering students’ basic needs beyond food and housing (e.g., health, transportation) and as benefiting students’ academic, health, physical, social, and professional well-being (e.g., recreational sports, student organizations). Because all students pay SUF, students, families, and universities commonly assume that all students (should) have equal access to SUFfunded services, and that SUF-funded services (should) support all students’ academic, physical, social, psychological, relational, and other forms of well-being equally well. In Wisconsin, SUF cover a wide variety of activities and services and are defined as: …charges, in addition to instructional fees, assessed to all students for student services, activities, programs and facilities that support the mission of University of Wisconsin System institutions. There are two categories of SUF, as follows: (1) Allocable. Allocable SUF are those SUF that provide substantial support for campus student activities as outlined in Section I.(B)(6)(a) and that are allocated by students, in consultation with the chancellor and subject to the final confirmation of the Board of Regents… (2) Non-allocable. Non-allocable SUF are those SUF that are used to support commitments for fixed financial obligations, personnel costs

1 Kelchen (2016) examines how the exact percentage is influenced by factors such as tuition caps and centralized control over fee-setting.

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(except as indicated in Section I (B)(6)(a)(3), ongoing operating and debt service costs of student unions, health centers, child care centers, recreational and athletic facilities and other university owned or controlled buildings; transit and busing services, child care grants; and sports programming including inter collegiate athletics and intramurals, but not club sports…. (University of Wisconsin System, 2019)

Allocable fees are more directly controlled by students and have been used on campuses to, for example, open new campus food pantries and fund student organizations, services, and initiatives. They made up varying percentages of the four campus’ total SUF, from about 30% at GLU to under 5% at BU. As noted in Chapter 3, higher education budget cuts and the tuition freeze in Wisconsin put heavy pressure on universities to quickly raise funds to plug budget gaps. Increasing the SUF charged to students was one way for universities to rapidly increase funding for services that a broad range of students demanded (such as increased mental health services or campus food pantries), and to fund services and infrastructure that appealed to some current students and potential future students (e.g., student unions or new dormitories). Not surprisingly, and as the literature on SUF would predict, the four universities in our study did increase SUF during the research period, which was a time marked by budget cuts and tuition freezes. Rates of increase varied widely, however, from about $10 a year to over $100 a year. Low- and moderate-income students at the universities that had larger increases noted them with frustration. For example, students at RSU thought that the tuition freeze meant that they would not see increased academic costs. However, many noticed in the fall semester of their second year that tuition and fees seemed more expensive. Indeed, while tuition stayed stable, SUF increased from about $1400 in 2014–2015 to $1500 during the 2015–2016 year. GLU students experienced an increase of more than 30% in SUF between 2013 and 2017—an increase that in part reflected the 20% budget cut the campus received in 2015. While SUF were included in the COA for all campuses, exactly how much a particular student would pay in SUF and what was covered by SUF was not always clear. At both BU and GLU, SUF were listed as a line item in the COA, but BU only provided a list of fees for fulltime students, while GLU broke down the fee allocation by credit hours. RSU provided a list of fees and descriptions for what the SUF covered,

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which none of the other campuses did. GSU did not provide a separate line item for SUF; rather, the fees were lumped into the tuition fee. The GSU website noted that SUF covered textbook rental, health and wellness services, and student activities, but did not provide cost allocations. Some campuses had students pay different SUF rates, depending on students’ tuition category and time status. For example, some campuses required that commuter students pay the same SUF as student who lived on campus. Others allowed commuter students to pay a per-credit additional fee if they wanted to use campus facilities that were funded through SUF (e.g., sports facilities, student health services). Some campuses created fees that only affected one group of students, such as special fees for international students. The complex and often convoluted information about what their SUF supported seldom led to student clarity about what their SUF covered. This is particularly important to note because, unlike other campus expenses, students in the UW System play a direct role in determining allocable SUF and in approving any increases in these SUF.2 Although each campus varied in terms of the SUF charged to students and how SUF were accounted for in the COA, each campus presented itself as providing students with an all-inclusive college experience, funded in part with SUF. Students could choose to never leave campus: living in dorms, using the university’s health facilities, eating in its cafeterias, visiting the bank in the student union, socializing and gaining professional skills through the student organizations, and so forth. Every university presented itself as working hard to build an inclusive and holistic experience for all students (and charged students as such), even those with high percentages of commuter students.

SUF Services At every university, SUF funded a broad range of services that were expected to support students’ health and well-being. Below, we describe the health and counseling services offered at the universities, and some of the “well-being” services that were offered across all campuses (student 2 Note, however, that during the time that the research occurred, there were a number of court cases brought by students in the UW System against chancellors who, the students claimed, had grabbed illegal decision-making over SUF from students, often to use SUF in ways that most students did not support.

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centers, recreational sports, and student organizations). Most of these services have a significant research base that indicates their potential benefits for students. For example, recreation centers are expected to provide students with health and wellness opportunities and also allow students to connect with other students through fitness classes or intramural sports. Student unions or centers perform a similar function, providing public spaces for students to hang out with friends, host student organization meetings, play games, and eat meals (McLane & Kozinets, 2019). The literature indicates that, through their time in student centers, students are exposed to different cultures, experiences, and abilities among their peers and potentially develop a larger sense of social cohesion and belonging (McLane & Kozinets, 2019). Similarly, student organizations, which are supported in part with segregated fees, are expected to provide spaces and opportunities for support and for students to develop meaningful relationships, particularly those looking for communities similar to those they had at home (Hurtado & Carter, 1997). In the next section, we explore how universities talked about student well-being and about the services funded through SUF, and then how students in the study actually experienced SUF-funded services. Students’ experiences challenge some of the literature and many of the universities’ narratives, which assume or claim that SUF funding equitably supports all students’ well-being. Instead, as with so many other aspects of lowand moderate-income students’ university experiences, the impacts of SUF-funded services were uneven, often less beneficial for lower-income students than for wealthier students, and often marked by bigotry and a lack of safety and accessibility for students marginalized by class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, age, and ability. Because of this, at three of the four universities (BU, RSU, and GSU) low- and moderate-income students often described feeling that their SUF were not supporting their college success. Instead, they described SUF being used to fund activities and infrastructure that did not meet their most pressing needs. Given the amount of financial aid they had to pay toward, or hours of work they had to allot to cover their annual SUF, this was very frustrating to many focal students in the study. For students working and going to school full time, money spent on athletics and recreational sports, or on updated student unions, often felt like a waste because the student could not (and might not want to) regularly use these services. In contrast, the SUF-funded services that many lower-income students did value (e.g., health services, transportation subsidies, student

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organizations focused on their needs) seemed to always be on the chopping block. For example, many GLU students commuted to school and depended heavily on the SUF-subsidized parking that the university had previously provided. First-year students were very frustrated to find, in their second year, that the parking spaces that were previously advertised as “free for students” were suddenly no longer free. As a result, commuter students who thought they would save money by commuting and taking advantage of the free parking spaces suddenly had hundreds of dollars in unexpected parking expenses, as well as long searches for parking that ate into their limited time. In contrast, about 20% of GLU’s SUF were spent supporting athletic services—services that commuter students almost never reported using. Other focal students talked about how they wanted to (and expected to) use SUF-funded services but found that they could not safely do so. For example, female students at GSU reported paying to use a local, forprofit gym because of the harassment they faced at the campus sports facilities—yet while the campus took no steps to address the harassment after it was reported, female students still had to pay for these facilities. Many minoritized students described similar experiences, where White, male, straight, able-bodied, and wealthy norms made them feel or experience a lack of physical and psychological safety. Thus, low- and moderate-income students—and particularly students who were not White, male, able-bodied, and straight—often felt that their most pressing needs were not met by SUF-funded services, and that the services that did exist were not as equitable or accessible as touted by the university. The disconnect between low- and moderate-income students’ needs and SUF allocations was most evident in students’ interactions with University Health Services (UHS), which is described in detail at the end of this chapter. Many of the other inequities fueled by current SUF priorities and funding approaches resulted from lower-income students’ greater struggles to secure basic needs (food, housing, health care), and significantly higher workloads (which resulted in less time to participate in social organizations or spaces). As a result of these different needs and experiences, low- and moderateincome students were much more likely to value campus food pantries, low-cost health care and transportation, and support for student organizations focused on minoritized students’ experiences than their wealthier counterparts, who were much more likely to talk about organizations that provided leadership experiences, student centers that provided “fun” and

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“memorable” experiences, and athletic facilities and events. This second set of funding priorities particularly dominated at BU, RSU, and GSU. In other words, low- and moderate-income students’ work schedules and financial precarity led to them having different needs than wealthier students. These needs were driven by the withered social safety net that so many students had experienced before coming to college, and by 50 years of state and national policy and funding decisions that have increasingly shifted the burden of paying for college from the public onto low-income students. And, because wealth inequality and poverty in the United States are shaped by long histories of racism, ethnicism, sexism, geographic disparities, and ableism, lower-income students were more likely on average to be students of color, from mother-headed homes, have a disability, come from urban or rural communities with low-performing schools, and/or identify as LGBTQI. These students’ struggles to be treated fairly, to build safe communities on campus, and to receive equitable resources compared to their wealthier peers were extensive. They consistently received less financial, human, infrastructural, and other forms of support—as well as basic protections—from three of the four campuses. Below, we first describe how universities framed students’ well-being, and then describe university narratives concerning how key SUF-funded services (student centers and organizations, recreational sports, and health services) were expected to support student well-being. In each section, we contrast these official descriptions of students’ well-being and SUFfunded services with low- and moderate-income students’ actual experiences engaging with these services. Examples of inequitable patterns arose across all SUF-funded services and are included in every section below. Similar findings have also reported in studies of marginalized students’ experiences with SUF-funded resources in other states (e.g., Pantel, 2019), and raise serious questions about common assumptions that SUF-funded services equitably support all students’ well-being.

How Universities Frame Well-Being The universities in this study, like most four-year universities, presented an all-encompassing college experience as the desired norm for all students. While students could choose to commute to campus, work off-campus, or access services outside of campus, universities often told their students that college was an “all-hours-of-the-day” experience, one in which they

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would “learn, grow, and flourish.” Universities’ websites proclaimed: “Welcome to your home away from home;” and, “Here, you will build a lifelong community of kinship and support.” Student’s all-encompassing college experiences were supposed to be developmentally and intellectually challenging, and to make students better people, professionals, and team members. College experiences were not supposed to be marked by trauma, long-term suffering, or the development of self-harming behaviors. Yet a growing literature has focused on students’ mental and physical health challenges while in school. Studies identify college as a time of exciting, but also difficult, transitions, and note that they are often marked by stress, homesickness, and sometimes isolation (Binfet, 2017; Sun, Hagedorn, & Zhang, 2016). In response, colleges have increasingly developed programming designed to support students’ physical, mental, and social health and well-being. Colleges in our study defined well-being broadly to include physical, mental, emotional, interpersonal, and social well-being, and touted that the university worked to assure each and all students’ wellbeing. For example, universities proclaimed that they provided students “academics, opportunities, and support,” that “the health and wellbeing of every student is a priority,” and that they were “committed to advancing the health and well-being of all members of the campus community by supporting all aspects of your well-being.” Universities’ emphasis on students’ health and well-being is not new; it reflects historical assumptions about universities serving in loco parentis , assumptions about universities’ responsibility to shape students’ civic and moral virtues, and assumptions about universities’ responsibility to prepare students for careers. The shape and scope of current university well-being efforts reflect research on (and concerns about) students’ declining mental and physical health and its consequences for campus safety (Prince, 2015); the relationships among various measures of health/well-being (e.g., mental health, sleep, alcohol consumption, eating habits) and student academic performance (MacKean, 2011; Prince, 2015; Trockel, Barnes, & Egget, 2000); and universities’ struggles to (re)define the shape and scope of their responsibility for students’ college experiences and general well-being. Wellness and health, including medical care, mental health counseling, and fitness and recreation, are increasingly framed as crucial components of the services that universities are expected to provide to students (Benson-Tilsen & Cheskis-Gold, 2017). Various studies claim

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that, without the support and resources provided from wellness and health centers and programs, as well as student centers and student organizations, students are less likely to thrive and may even suffer (Munoz, Miller, & Poole, 2016; Perrault, 2018). In response, universities have expanded their physical and mental health programming (Prince, 2015), including support for students in crisis (Benson-Tilsen & Cheskis-Gold, 2017). University support for shared spaces (like students centers) and shared social settings (like student organizations) has also been identified as important in providing opportunities for students to form new relationships and interpersonal skills, and gain a sense of connection and belonging to the campus—outcomes that are also correlated in research with improved student outcomes (Strayhorn, 2018). The various spaces, activities, and services described above as essential to supporting students’ well-being are all largely funded through SUF at the four universities. Universities consistently described these services as being offered in an equitable, inclusive, and low-cost manner, and as both supporting individual students’ well-being and building “community” on their campuses. There were important differences across the campuses, however. While three of the four campuses generally focused on providing services that supported community-building and students’ collective health and wellbeing, GSU focused on individual students’ health and well-being and provided less institutional support for students. For example, it encouraged students to seek out medical supplies and care from their resident advisors or to obtain “a self-care kit” if they had cold-like symptoms, as opposed to accessing UHS. GSU further framed personal health struggles as opportunities for students to “take responsibility” for their own wellbeing. GSU’s recreation center was the only one in the study not to have a mission or values statement. Indeed, rather than focusing on how students could benefit from the use of such services to better the campus community, GSU framed the recreation center as a space where the university could benefit from students (e.g., by arguing that a healthier student body would increase retention). The True Costs of Student Centers Student centers or unions are important spaces on many university campuses. They often serve as hubs for student services and provide public space in which students can meet, work, study, eat, and learn

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about events on campus. Indeed, universities often showcase student centers or unions as “home away from home” spaces. Recently, however, some campuses have spent significant amounts of money to renovate these centers. Using SUF, funds from wealthy donors, and local and state bonds, some universities and their students have invested a great deal of money into student centers. On two of the four campuses, RSU and BU, significant funds were raised by levying new student fees to renovate or build new student union spaces; students were thus paying hundreds of dollars a year in extra SUF for these spaces. While there is a necessary debate about what constitutes an “arms race” in higher education amenities (McClure, 2019), it is important to note here that many low-income students in the study felt strongly that renovated student union spaces—which in RSU’s and BU’s cases had multi-floor, sun-filled atriums, multiple food and entertainment amenities, and a large number of meeting rooms and spaces for student organizations—did not help them survive in college. They were also generally well-populated, but not markedly full. In contrast, GLU’s student center was packed every day because it was one of the only public, indoor spaces on the campus. However, as the campus struggled to change lightbulbs and stock toilet paper following a 20% budget cut, there was never any serious discussion about renovating the student center. SUF remained focused on other student priorities that were much more deeply valued by focal students, such as childcare, a food pantry, and organizations that supported minoritized students’ needs. And GLU’s decision to put resources into low- and moderate-income students’ needs was recognized and lauded by many of the students, who felt that it indicated that the university valued their success, identities, and basic needs. Students generally valued having student union and student center spaces; however, not all students were equally able to access student center spaces, services, and amenities. As with so many other services supported with SUF, low-income students often did not have the time to use these services as much as wealthier students. Students who were working 30 or 40 hours a week, for example, described running into the student center to grab their first meal of the day in the afternoon, between classes. But they did not have time to stop and do homework, much less hang out, in the centers, or to take advantage of the recreational amenities or group meeting rooms that some of the centers had. In contrast, wealthier students were more likely to describe the student centers as spaces in which they met friends, hung out, accessed services (such as

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the bank or meeting rooms), and made memories that would stick with them after graduation. In other words, wealthier students described using the student centers in ways that more closely aligned with viewing student centers as “amenities” catering to wealthier student’s wants. Time was not the only constraint to low- and moderate-income students’ use of student centers. Several students selected their college because it felt like a “home away from home” and they felt as if they could belong on the campus. However, for many of these students, those feelings dissipated once they arrived, as the promises of inclusive and welcoming communities did not play out in their residence halls, classrooms, or student centers, and as they found themselves unable to access spaces and opportunities that they were promised on their campus tours. While many students commented on the beauty and/or hominess of their university’s student centers, students marginalized by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, and ability expressed different levels of comfort using these public spaces, and in the most extreme cases felt unsafe spending time in some of the centers. At RSU, for example, Hmong students felt particularly unwelcomed in the student center. They were met with stares and sneers whenever they walked in together or when they spoke Hmong to each other. The discomfort led them to spend as little time as possible there, only walking through to grab food and then go to the Office of Multicultural Affairs Lounge, which was tucked away from the majority White student spaces. At BU, African-American students reported very similar experiences in the student center and in other public spaces on campus. At GSU, female students experienced active harassment (including having laser pointers follow them around) in gyms and other public spaces. These were, fundamentally, moments in which minoritized students were given the clear message by fellow students that they were not wanted and that they did not belong. They drove students out of spaces for which they paid fees to use. And when students reported these behaviors to administrators, their concerns were consistently dismissed. Thus, while university public spaces were officially open to them, minoritized students quickly learned that they would be treated unequally; they might be denigrated, humiliated, or made to feel unsafe, and they would not receive any backup from university administrators. As we will see later in this chapter, these experiences were common across SUF-funded services, including the counseling services that minoritized students sometimes visited after events like experiencing public acts

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of racism in student centers, as they struggled to feel like they belonged at the university. The True Costs of Student Organizations The national literature emphasizes that students join student organizations for a variety of reasons: to network or gain professional development skills (Munoz et al., 2016); to make a difference in their community (Jones & Hill, 2003); or as a source of support and belonging (Bowman, Park, & Denson, 2015). And many students report that student organizations are one of the few spaces where they can build friendships outside of their residence halls or classrooms. For these reasons, SUF are often used to fund student organizations in universities across the United States. Across all four campuses, student organizations were described by focal students as spaces for students to connect with one another and to develop meaningful, long-lasting relationships. While all four campuses emphasized relationship-building as an expected outcome of student organizations, university administrators differed in the other reasons why they encouraged students to join student organizations. At RSU and GSU, academic and professional development was emphasized, whereas at GLU and BU, student organizations were expected to provide students with a sense of feeling at home or part of a larger community of kinship and support. Despite a significant portion of students participating in student organizations (ranging from 36% to 54% of focal students across universities), many focal students also reported that they were unable to fully participate in organizations due to the additional costs that participation entailed. Many of these students expressed feeling frustrated, as they knew their fees went toward maintaining and funding these groups, but their financial needs marginalized them from being able to fully use them. For example, students who worked or were in intensive academic programs often did not have time to participate in student organizations. In his first semester, Adam, an RSU student, worked over 40 hours a week delivering pizzas to afford college. By the end of the semester, he felt overworked, exhausted, and isolated, as he had not made many friends. In order to feel more a part of the campus community and possibly join a fraternity, he decided to reduce his work hours, but this meant he had to rely on his savings to afford college. While Adam felt his decision was “worth it,”

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after a year of trying to balance these demands, he ended up transferring to another college with lower tuition to reduce his costs further. Time and financial constraints to joining student organizations were particularly painful for students who could not afford to join national professional organizations, and which students thought would be important sources of networking and professional knowledge for their postcollege lives; and for minoritized students who could not participate in social identity group organizations. For students who expected their college experience to include opportunities to make friends for life or to further their professional development, hidden costs sometimes reshaped this expectation over the course of their first and second years at college. Professional organizations and student organizations usually required joining fees or fees to support group activities. In some cases, students faced additional costs related, for example, to buying the kinds of clothes expected by the group. And they always required time—something which some students, particularly students working 30 or more hours and commuter students—did not have to give to the organization. For students who reported that fees stopped them from joining professional groups and social groups, the financial cost was often overshadowed by the social and emotional consequences of feeling that they could not take part in activities they assumed would be central to their college experience and to their opportunities after college. Eve, a GLU student who came from the foster care system, could not find a job during her first year of college. She received a full financial aid package and some money from community members before leaving for college but had a very tight budget. She joined a Christian club on campus, which she enjoyed very much; she got along well with group members and liked hanging out with them. When the group talked about going out somewhere, however, she shied away and said that she was backed up on homework or had other plans. She did not want anyone to know about her financial situation, so she lied whenever discussions turn to socializing together in a setting where people were expected to spend money. The costs of Eve’s financial constraints and inability to fully participate in the group were greater than her momentary social discomfort, but in fact represented a barrier to fully engaging with one of college’s key outcomes—developing social relationships and professional networks that can support students during and after college. Such relationships improve students’ well-being in college and increase their post-college career opportunities (Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Wang, Cullen, Yao, & Li, 2013).

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Other students, particularly minoritized students who lived on campus, described their participation in student organizations that were designed to form community around particular social identity groups (LGBTQI groups, multicultural centers, etc.) as essential for their mental health.3 For many students of color, for example, student organizations were one of the few spaces where they felt safe and welcomed on campus. Social marginalization and lack of safety have been well documented on historically White college campuses in the United States, for LGBTQidentified students (Woodford, Howell, Kulick, & Silverschanz, 2013) and specifically for transgender students (Newhouse, 2013), for students of color (Harwood, Huntt, Mendenhall, & Lewis, 2012), and as mediated by sexual violence against women (Gross, Winslett, Roberts, & Gohm, 2006; Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987). The research clearly demonstrates that the social marginalization of minoritized students on predominately White, wealthy, and heteronormative college campuses can cause deep feelings of isolation and exclusion from the campus community (Lewis, 2012; Sidanius, Van Laar, Levin, & Sinclair, 2004; Vaccaro, 2012); sadly, the prevalence of physical and sexual violence is also part of this process (Gross et al., 2006; Lawrence, 1990). In our ethnographic research, we observed and heard from students who experienced marginalization on their campus, and who spoke eloquently of the social costs that they paid for living in such an environment. The emotional costs of social marginalization are well known (Arbona & Jimenez, 2014; Muehlenkamp, Hilt, Ehlinger, & McMillan, 2015; Walton & Cohen, 2011), and the negative effect of social marginalization on academic outcomes is also well established (Hurtado & Carter, 1997). The financial costs of social marginalization are less often discussed (but for important preliminary work in this direction, see Archer & Hutchings, 2003; Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013). While the students in our study reported emotional stress caused by social marginalization, many students also reported direct financial consequences, including the costs they incurred to identify and spend time in safe spaces. For many of the students in our study, particularly those at RSU, BU, and GSU, social identity group organizations were consistently identified at the safest and most “homey” space on campus. The most effective 3 See Vaccaro and Newman (2016) for a discussion about the importance of a sense of belonging to students’ well-being, and the particular role that social identity group organizations could play in their sense of belonging and mental health.

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of these spaces was almost like a university within the university: students could access student advisors, work-study opportunities, social events, and specially-designed “high impact practices” (such as study away programs) specially designed for them. They made friends and hung out with them, shared food, did homework together, and supported one another when someone was harassed or threatened.4 Yet, many minoritized students with whom we worked noted diminishing financial and structural support for their student organizations in wake of the 2015 budget cuts. Despite paying fees that should contribute toward funding and support, students reported that their organizations were receiving funding cuts. Veronica, a Latina RSU student, previously was able to attend a professional leadership conference for Latinx students, but due to the budget cuts, the following year, the student organization was unable to secure funding. Similarly, RSU students in the Hmong Club were given less funding for their events and conference travel in the second year of the study (following another round of budget cuts). While this funding freeze was felt across many student organizations, students of color felt particularly targeted, given the hostile environment on their campus, the administration’s lack of support in addressing that hostility campus-wide, and their inability to safely access so many of the other organizations and services to which their fees contributed. The True Costs of Recreation Centers Recreation centers are designed to be spaces where students can socialize and engage in healthy practices. Students in our study used recreation centers to work out, play intramural sports, learn about healthy practices, and spend time with friends, often in a space conveniently located near their residence halls. Recreation centers on all four campuses were funded through SUF, and as such, were theoretically free and equally accessible to all students. As with other SUF-funded services, however, in practice students experienced additional costs—financial, social, and emotional— in trying to use these services. As with student centers and student organizations, for many lowincome students in the study, intense academic demands, coupled with 4 Research on student organizations similarly indicates that they can play an essential role in counteracting isolation and exclusion, often through the creation of “safe spaces,” while the rest of the campus remains unwelcoming or unsafe (Vaccaro, 2012).

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long work hours, made it difficult or impossible to access the recreation center. Most students said they wished they could go to the center to work out, get health coaching, or play in intramural sports, and acknowledged that it would benefit their physical, mental, and emotional health. However, balanced against their grades and their income, working out and hanging out was not a priority. Some students sought out more convenient exercise opportunities that better aligned with their schedule. Commuter students, for example, sometimes sought out gyms near their homes instead. Alphonse, an RSU STEM student who was also a part of the symphony orchestra, chose to run on the treadmill located in the basement of his residence hall rather than walk to the recreation center because it saved him precious minutes to dedicate to studying or practicing. As noted in Chapter 4, however, many low-income students did not have such easy alternatives, because their older dormitories did not have amenities like gyms. For other students, recreation centers were unsafe, hostile spaces. Female-identified students at GSU—whether focal members of our study or other students with whom we spoke—regularly reported that the campus recreation center was an unwelcome, if not unsafe, place in which to work out. This was confirmed by female athletes who used these spaces regularly with their peers. Male-identified students at GSU, and in particular male athletes, would leer, hover, huddle, interject, and otherwise create a hostile environment that resulted in female-identified students coming to the conclusion that the weight and exercise machines were not worth the effort. Instead, students like Katie, who could afford to, purchased private, off-campus memberships at workout facilities; in fact, Katie and others reported that these off-campus facilities were regularly used by female-identified GSU students who had grown sick of the hostility they faced in the campus gym. These students were still required to pay their full SUF, including fees for the gym, but felt it was worthwhile to pay the private gym fee because it allowed them to take care of their health and get exercise year-round. Those who could not afford private gym memberships either renegotiated their schedule and exercise routines to avoid peak male hours or found other fitness outlets on campus, such as teaming up with majority-male friend groups for intramural sport events. Complaints about male students’ behaviors in the gym yielded no results, though some students continued to file them regularly, if only to voice their protest for having to continue to pay fees for services they could not safely use.

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Hmong students at both RSU and BU experienced racial aggression directed toward them when playing recreational and intramural sports like volleyball and basketball. Research has explored how playing sports or being in organizations reinforces collective, mutual relations and served as a space to foster supportive relationships among Hmong students (Ngo, Dyke, & LoBello, 2018). Hmong students in our study experienced similar benefits from participating in recreational sports, but these benefits came at a significant cost. For example, Caesar, an RSU student, enjoyed playing volleyball because it not only helped him build relationships with other Hmong students on a predominantly White campus, but also enhanced his leadership and communication skills. But, Caesar felt unsafe playing volleyball in the recreation center. At RSU and BU, Hmong students were often met with aggressive stares, comments to get off the court before their time was up, and racial slurs. Because Hmong students at RSU had previously received little support from the administration when they reported bias incidents, they felt they could not rely on the administration to protect them in these public spaces. In order to avoid interactions with White students, they either withdrew, avoided intramural sports, or played when there would be fewer students present, which often meant late at night. Similarly, to avoid tensions with White students, Hmong students at BU chose to play volleyball among themselves rather than participate in the popular intramural volleyball league, and they used an older gym hidden in the basement of the campus exercise facility, away from areas frequented by other students. Thus, once again, low-income students— and particularly low-income students marginalized by ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual identity—faced unequal access to and experiences in the services for which they were paying. Furthermore, they found that university administrators were generally not responsive to their concerns, even in situations where they were worried about their physical safety. The True Costs of University Health Services One of the most important areas in which SUF funding and its limitations impacted low-income students—and impacted them more severely than their wealthier counterparts—was around student health services. In general, college students (and particularly low-income college students) have limited access to health insurance and physical and mental healthcare (Eisenberg & Chung, 2012), and this results in students seeking

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care in emergency rooms or forgoing any sort of medical attention (Dicken, 2008). Yet students’ health needs have increased over the past decades. Some students are impacted by acute and chronic illnesses that play a significant role in loss of time dedicated to academics and missed days of school. Chronic illnesses (including anxiety and depression) have increased among college students and create profound challenges related to the invisibility of illness to faculty and other students, unpredictable relapses, and trouble qualifying for financial aid due to absences or poor grades as a result of repeated health episodes (Royster & Marshall, 2008). With access to healthcare becoming more difficult to obtain, and more students in need of medical and mental health care (American College Health Association, 2019; Center for Collegiate Mental Health, 2018), University Health Services (UHS) and other mental health programs have become a vital resource for students, particularly low- and moderateincome students. UHS at four-year colleges are expected to provide services and programs to promote and protect students’ well-being, including by assisting students as they cope and manage with healthrelated issues such as diet, sexual health, alcohol consumption, smoking, sleep, and stress (Henry et al., 2018). They are also expected to provide no- or low-cost access to a variety of preventive health services. While UHS do not provide emergency or specialized medical care, they do sometimes play a role in supporting students who are managing chronic illnesses, and they often play a role in triaging and supporting students who are sexually assaulted. Health Care It was common during campus tours for recruiters and student ambassadors to make broad claims that health services were provided by the university through UHS. Some campus tours, for example, touted that students could easily access preventive health, mental health, and travel health services through UHS. UHS websites regularly led with statements like “we offer quality health care at low or no cost,” “most services have no cost, as UHS is funded with your own student segregated fees,” “We are here to support your health and well-being,” and “We provide treatment when you are ill, injured, or in distress.” These broad statements reinforced to students that UHS would serve as their only needed health care provider. All four campuses claimed to provide high-quality healthcare that was both inclusive and low-cost. Most websites also emphasized UHS’ accessibility and inclusivity. For example, one university claimed they

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value all “cultures, backgrounds, genders, and orientations” and always attempt to provide “a safe and inclusive health services environment that meets our diverse student population’s needs.” Another touted their integrated model of care, which they described as culturally respectful, fiscally responsible, and developmentally appropriate for all students. Because of this narrative of care, many students in the study reported thinking that they would not have any health care costs or needs outside of UHS. In response, some low-income students allowed their enrollment in BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s public healthcare coverage program for low-income residents) to lapse; some moderate-income students and their families gratefully removed students from parents’ insurance plans. UHS did provide access to important medical care for students. Students generally reported positive and easy experiences accessing some preventive health services and initial mental health services, and on three of the four campuses, most students reported feeling that they received quality care from UHS (though, as noted below, not always from the counseling services). However, students also consistently reported facing unexpected costs to access campus health services, and over time, many experienced medical needs for which UHS did not provide an affordable care option for students. Students instead experienced: • Additional charges for services that they expected would be free (such as hormonal contraceptives, medications, the check-ups required for many internships, and most physical therapy services for non-athletes); • UHS policies that denied them essential forms of on-campus medical care (none of the UHS’s covered emergency care, urgent care, psychiatric services, or third-party specialized care; most did not provide physical therapy for injuries to non-athletes or dental care); • UHS care that ended at the university’s borders, though students moved off and onto campus frequently (e.g., no support in handling a roommate who became ill from alcohol poisoning off campus, or in linking students to police services if a sexual assault occurred in off-campus student housing); • University tuition and fee policies that seemed to ignore students’ medical emergencies (e.g., campuses that refused to refund or freeze students’ tuition if they were hospitalized and lost the second half of a semester).

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The costs of healthcare—both in and outside of UHS—were oftentimes unexpected, extremely burdensome, and fundamentally undermined low- and moderate-income students’ academic and financial wellbeing. This was no small matter. Although in popular imagination (and most students’ and families’ expectations) the college years are years of good health, between one-quarter and one-third of all focal students experienced a major medical emergency over the course of the time in which we worked closely with them. These were major health events that put their academic, financial, and often familial well-being at great risk. Additional students struggled with chronic health issues, such as depression or injuries that restricted their movement, whose consequences often played out over years. The sheer number of medical issues faced by focal students was shaped by and reflected the horribly inequitable access to health care that exists in the United States. Many low- and moderate-income students in the study had not visited a doctor or dentist in years before coming to college, were not insured, and simply could not afford the emergencies they faced while in college. Yet, the added stresses of college and work, changes in diet and exercise, and continued lack of access to some health services while in college often came together to fuel low-income students’ chronic and emergency health events. These events in turn deeply impacted students’ academic, social, and familial well-being, as described below. Despite the growing trend to frame health and wellness services as integral to a healthy, sustainable campus community, students’ experiences with health care while in college were uneven in quality, cost, and convenience. Low-income students generally had no affordable offcampus options, but they soon came to realize that UHS often entailed unexpected costs. For example, UHS generally offered a basic menu of preventative and treatment services at a low cost (but often with fees of $5 or $10). Many students’ preferred or needed services cost significantly more (e.g., only latex condoms were regularly available at no cost as a contraceptive device), less invasive procedures often cost more, and there were many services that were not offered by campus health services or required high fees to access. Third-party providers, special exams (e.g., for internships or Peace Corps), copies of medical records, certain kinds of sexual health products or procedures, physical therapy, and orthopedic products were either not covered by UHS or carried fees that added up quickly. For example, at RSU’s UHS, students were charged for lab work, medicine, and supplies, including up to $90 for different forms of birth

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control, $50 for procedures, $35 for titer lab reports, $25 for lab tests, $75 for medical supplies, $135 for immunizations, and $40 for special exams. Emergency Care Some students had healthcare access through familial or personal insurance (e.g., through Medicaid or BadgerCare), which allowed them to submit on-campus care claims and access off-campus health services. Yet, as noted previously, many students said that they expected health costs to be low-to-nonexistent while in college since they were “young and healthy,” and since UHS was touted as a “one-stop” healthcare service. In some cases, students decided to forego signing up for health insurance for that reason. Yet, over the course of their first year, about one-third of the focal students from each campus experienced health issues resulting in unanticipated costs of at least hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Unexpected emergency care was experienced as one of the greatest unplanned expenses for students. Emergency care is not covered by UHS, and even if a student has health insurance, it often requires high co-pays. An emergency medical situation can therefore be financially devastating to students without medical insurance or with substandard insurance. Zoey, an uninsured student at BU, started to panic after a bout of acute stomach pain, fearing an attack of appendicitis. She called the nursing line at the local hospital and was told to go to the emergency room. “I got to the ER and I said, I don’t have insurance, and I need to figure out a way to pay for this.” The hospital ran test after expensive test to try to diagnose the problem: When you go to the ER they have to diagnose you, you can’t leave until they figure out what is wrong with you…I called my mom and told her they wanted to do a CT scan, and that costs several thousand dollars…. There was a long list of procedures; we were totally freaking out. I was in a lot of pain, and I was so scared. Just one of those procedures would totally put us in the hole. [The student’s insurance bill arrived at her mother’s house a few weeks later.] My mom sent me a photo of the bill. It felt like a punch in the gut. $17,000; it was like a punch in the gut. The room alone was $350, and the radiology bill was like $6000, because they ran so many tests.

She and her mother applied for assistance through the “community fund” to cover emergency medical care for uninsured students with financial need. Eight months later, after months of filling out paperwork

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documenting the family’s financial need, the situation had still not been resolved. Zoey’s relationship with her mother had become very strained, resulting in new stressors and concerns that undermined Zoey’s recovery and her emotional and familial well-being. Paige, a student at GSU, began her first year without health insurance due to lack of financial resources or presumed need, so when she began to have severe abdominal pains, she paid out-of-pocket costs for off-campus testing. She found that she needed to have her gallbladder removed, and hastily signed up for health insurance, hoping her enrollment period would begin in time for her surgery. To keep covering her health, food, and school costs, she worked full-time at a local gas station and convenience store. Similar to Paige’s experience, in the middle of the Spring semester, Renee, a GLU student with very few financial resources, had a severe asthma attack and fainted. She was hospitalized and stayed in the emergency unit for several weeks. To offset the major costs, Renee’s aunt posted her story on a crowdfunding app, which raised $50. Renee was then hospitalized again when her heart rate suddenly sped up. Since Renee did not have personal health insurance, a social worker helping her case found an emergency insurance plan for Renee. However, since she was hospitalized for nearly a month, the costs incurred far exceeded what Renee and her family could manage. When asked about the exact amount, Renee responded that she opened one of the hospital bills and when she saw “more zeroes than [she] could count at a glance,” she quickly put the bill aside. Whether it was $1000 or $100,000, Renee simply could not pay, especially now that she was instructed not to engage in strenuous work. Luckily for Renee, the dean’s office at GLU allowed Renee to receive medical tuition benefits, which allowed her to drop all of her classes and continue the following semester without penalty. Since Renee’s neardeath experience occurred past the add/drop deadline, she would usually have been responsible for a portion of the tuition. However, the campus’ policy allowed Renee to transfer her payments to the following semester when she returned to school. Renee’s experience was atypical; the other three campuses did not allow students who became ill to shift tuition costs in this manner. The dearth of healthcare budgeting estimates in COAs (for on-campus co-pays and for off-campus charges) and every campus’ painfully incomplete efforts to communicate to students and their families that they

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should have, at a minimum, emergency healthcare insurance if at all possible, left students ill-prepared for the real health costs that awaited them in college. While problematic for many students, the lack of university engagement with real healthcare costs was particularly problematic for low- and moderate-income students, who were more likely to be uninsured or underinsured, more likely to have postponed healthcare costs, and less likely to be able to pay for needed services on or off campus. Counseling Services At each university, the majority of students described themselves as “stressed” at some point during the study. A significant minority of focal students experienced stress, anxiety, or depression that resulted in their accessing mental health services. In a number of cases, students described their high levels of stress as a direct response to financial pressures and/or their responses to them (e.g., overstretched school and work hours, leading to a lack of sleep); for many of these students, this stress was compounded by social stressors caused by their experiences of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia on campus. In most cases, these students had not previously used mental health services and did not expect to use them in college. As with other health services, students had generally assumed that mental health services were accessible through UHS if needed, and that the on-campus service would be of high quality. Yet, as with other health services, students who found themselves in more serious or emergency situations often did not have access to the services they expected. Janet, for example, visited her college’s UHS for counseling services. When she expressed suicidal thoughts, however, she was told that the UHS counseling services could no longer help her and she would have to access psychiatric services off campus and out-of-pocket. She did not have the funds to do so, and so instead was put on the waiting list for a non-profit organization that provided psychiatric services to the whole city. She had to wait weeks to see a psychiatrist, and in the meantime she became more depressed, could not refill her anxiety medications, began missing classes and work, got in fights with her roommates, and fell deeply behind. She ended up failing two of her classes, which in turn placed her on academic probation and put her financial aid at risk. Renee, whose health emergency was described above, experienced a sharp decline in her mental health after being released from the hospital. Since she was not able to return to school or work immediately, she

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felt “stuck” at home. Pushing her medical bills aside further added to the deterioration of her mental health. She began to ask herself if any of it was worth it—“borrow more money for more schooling that costs more money to pay for what? Medical bills.” A previously optimistic and positive young woman, Renee became depressed. This year’s been like a, it’s been a fight like physically, like health-wise, physically, emotionally, mentally, like everything is laying on me and yeah, I can laugh about it and I can smile about it but at the end of the day I have to go home and I have to look in a mirror and that this really is the reality of my situation. So, I can cry about it and get committed or I can try to change it. Like, there’s a, I don’t know. I feel like life keeps throwing stuff at you and it keeps beating you down and at some point, you’re at the bottom. Like, you cannot get any lower. I feel like that’s where I am right now. I can’t get any lower or do any worse than I’m already doing. So, I can only go up. I can’t do anything else, like there’s nothing else I can do that will make me feel lower than I already do so I just have to go up. So, I think the sooner people realize that, the better off they are.

During these dark few months immediately after her near-death experience, Renee would have benefited tremendously from speaking with a mental health counselor. However, since she was not a currently enrolled student at GLU, she could not access the school’s counseling services. She mentioned that she did not want to add to the costs that she already incurred due to her physical health issues, which were out of her control, thus placing the burden back on herself to “control” her mental health, following this intense and very, very costly experience. GLU is to be praised for allowing her to shift her tuition fees to the next semester, which relieved a bit of her financial burden and assured she did not have to address the additional complication of failed classes (an issue with which students at all three other campuses struggled). But in exchange, she could not access even the limited health services that were available to her as a student through UHS, and she could not access these services outside of college without increasing her already overwhelming debt. Kyle, a student at RSU, experienced this move into and out of his college’s UHS as well. When he first arrived at college, he pushed aside addressing his issues of loneliness, stress and anxiety that resulted in insomnia and depression. His grades started to slip and he grew more isolated, missing classes and assignments. When Kyle finally decided to

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see a therapist on campus, his mood improved, but by then, he was too far behind with his coursework. For the sake of his mental well-being, Kyle decided to leave RSU and pursue a music career. He said he wished he never attended college as the only thing he got out of college was “over $4000 of debt and a mental illness.” At GSU, a university with a reported sexual assault rate of over 50% among our focal students, students—and particularly female-identifying students—reported UHS’ counseling services to be unsatisfactory. They either did not seek out help to manage their mental health needs, or they sought out local, private counseling and therapy. Students who experienced sexual assault during the course of the study reported that it was very difficult to get counseling appointments and the counselors were seldom helpful or insightful once they did manage to see them. Students noted that the counselors generally seemed prepared to help students deal with the stress of assignments and exam periods, but not the traumas that they actually accrued as college students. One student, Lizzie, was able to arrange to meet with her psychology professor, who was also a local practicing psychologist, for weekly sessions at their off-campus practice. Most students simply stopped seeking mental health care. Indeed, while three campuses stated that they practice integrative and inclusive approaches to healthcare in order to best serve diverse student populations, several students at each campus felt that UHS fell short when it came to counseling minoritized students. Betty, a Hmong RSU student, dealt with a number of obstacles during her time in college. Betty had difficulty connecting with other students and faculty due to her ethnic identity and commuter status. As Betty worked over 40 hours a week, split between two jobs, she often did not have time to participate in student organizations, such as the Hmong Club, or to meet with faculty or support staff. As a result, she felt lonely and isolated. Her grades suffered and she described herself as feeling like a “ghost in the classroom.” Additionally, she was estranged from her mother and her college was far from family members who practiced Hmong traditions and rituals. In an effort to do something about her mental and emotional health, Betty went to RSU’s counseling services. She met with a White counselor who knew nothing about Hmong culture and recommended that Betty find a practitioner off campus who specialized in “multiculturalism.” Betty felt frustrated and betrayed. She was paying for counseling services through fees but could not access good care because the campus’ counseling services had no expertise in working with students from ethnic,

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racial, or national-cultural backgrounds that were not White, Midwestern, and US-centric. Betty never sought off-campus counseling services, as she could not afford to pay for them and school, and she could not take on more work hours. Her mental health continued to spiral, and she eventually stopped out of college. Racially minoritized students at BU expressed similar experiences and frustrations with their school’s counseling services; students would share the name of the one counselor who seemed able to serve them in a culturally responsive manner and often waited to go in until that one counselor had an appointment available. When students on the campus later mobilized in protests aligned with Black Lives Matter, one of their key demands was that the university hire more counselors and academic advisers of color who understood and were experienced in addressing minoritized students’ needs. Inability to access high-quality, no- or low-cost counseling services come at a great cost to students. The decision to put off needed mental healthcare services was common among focal students, who were deeply concerned about the unexpected costs they would entail. While they often had no choice but to seek medical care when they had a physical health emergency, most students felt that they just had to “handle” mental health issues if low-cost, culturally responsive care was not available. Many of the students also had very limited schedules in which to seek out counseling services, because they were working so many hours and often struggling to keep up with classes. However, students’ inability to access this care through the university often had long-term consequences, as students’ health deteriorated and their efforts to balance school, work, and very limited budgets became more precarious. Eventually, as in the case of Kyle and Betty, some low- and moderate-income students who faced unmet healthcare needs—and particularly mental healthcare needs—walked away from college with high debt and no degree; others, like Renee, faced years of increasingly precarious efforts to balance the three. It is again important to recognize and emphasize that the students who had the greatest unmet healthcare needs were the students who had the least access to high-quality university services. Wealthy students generally seemed content with the UHS focus on preventive care and wellness resources. They visited UHS stress clinics and reported feeling better about their workload. They paid $5 or $10 for services and could comfortably afford these costs. And, if they had health emergencies,

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they were usually able to access off-campus care through their parents’ insurance. And again, as with so many resources on campus, UHS policies and services were both unequal and inequitable. They could not pay to access all UHS services, but low-income students’ healthcare needs were also often different than wealthier students’ needs, and they were less likely to be covered by UHS. For example, many low-income students had not visited a dentist in years and were behind on needed vaccines. Yet these services were not free, were in fact sometimes quite expensive, and were often required for desired academic tracks (such as working in schools or hospitals). Low-income students were more likely to have major health emergencies, but neither UHS nor the university provided emergency healthcare coverage. And low-income students, particularly students of color, struggled intensely to find culturally responsive healthcare providers in UHS.

Conclusion Students, families, and the general public often assume and expect that colleges will provide holistic support for students’ well-being, and that college will be a protected and protective time, in which students can focus on their studies and “get ahead” while receiving some public support for their efforts (through state subsidies and federal grants and loans). But as university budgets are cut, the social services provided by universities continue to shrink. This mirrors the contraction of public services outside the university as well. Students move off and on campus and navigate the social welfare systems inside and outside of the university all the time. Low-income students, we observed, had to do this much more than wealthier students: they spent more time off-campus caring for and visiting family, working, and (in their second year) living far from campus to decrease costs; and they often came to college with previously unmet health and dental needs and lower-quality K-12 educational experiences than their wealthier counterparts. Low-income students therefore entered college with different needs than wealthier students, and during their time in college, they often developed different needs as well. The fraying safety nets inside and outside of the university overlapped and reinforced each other in students’ experiences, and too often, resulted in situations of deep health, financial, academic, and social precarity for low-income students.

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A careful analysis of low-income students’ experiences interacting with university SUF-funded services lays bare some of the contradictions in current university policies. SUF-funded services are supposed to be accessible to all and equitable in their design. Too often, however, they are more responsive to wealthier students’ expectations than they are to lowincome students’ needs. For students working full time and going to school full time, money spent on athletics and recreational sports, or on updated student unions, felt like harmful costs, because the student could not regularly use these services but still had to pay for them. In contrast, about one-third of all low- and moderate-income focal students suffered a significant medical event, emergency, or serious chronic medical condition during the 18 months of the study; UHS almost never covered these events, leaving students with additional unexpected costs that they had assumed would be covered by their SUF. Students of color felt especially disenfranchised by the SUF-provided services, from student clubs, recreational sports facilities, to counseling services. For these students, SUF-funded services did the opposite of their intended goal, making students feel unwelcomed, disrespected, like they didn’t belong, or physically unsafe. In many cases, in an attempt to deal with their struggles to belong on campus, students would seek further support through mental health services, only to find yet another level of unresponsive or unsupportive services. Without carefully considering the classed, raced, sexed and gendered dimensions of students’ needs, the role of SUF services can further a sense of marginalization and alienation among low-income and minoritized students, instead of building community and a sense of belonging, as universities and much of the student services literature claims they do. While this chapter has focused on SUF and students’ well-being, there are evident parallels here with inequities in students’ access to and experiences with student housing and food services, described in Chapter 4; and in students’ experiences with academic costs, described in Chapter 3. In providing for both students’ living needs and their well-being, universities’ decisions about what to fund and what to cut too often appeared to align more fully with wealthier students’ wants than they did with lower-income students’ needs. This pattern was also evident in students’ academic experiences. These class-differentiated policies, decisions, and programs did not stem from Machiavellian administrators trying to suck every penny out of low-income students. Instead, they arose from the particular constraints

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that universities faced on their budgets; the new logics for stanching the gaps in their budgets that they were being encouraged to adopt by the UW System Board of Regents, the legislature, and much of the higher education literature; and their lack of careful analysis of (or care for) what the class-differentiated consequences of any particular policy might be. Perhaps more than in any other chapter so far, and because of its focus on students’ holistic well-being, our analysis of students’ experiences with SUF also emphasizes that class-inequitable policies interacted with other forms of social marginalization to shape student experiences and student access to services. Students’ experiences were deeply inequitable along lines of gender, ethnic, racial, sexual, and other aspects of their identities. In the United States, people’s wealth is already deeply overdetermined by their race, ethnicity, gender, and whether they live in a single- or double-parent household (among other characteristics). In our observations, college policies and services did not disrupt these inequalities. Indeed, on all campuses but GLU, these inequalities appeared to be exacerbated by campus policies, practices, and budget decisions. The purported goals of SUF are to enhance and support student wellbeing and build community. Yet without careful attention to who exactly comprises the campus community and what its members’ needs are, these services often do the exact opposite. As the low- to moderate-income students in our study reported, they too often experienced SUF as a tax they paid to subsidize wealthier students’ “college experience.” SUF amenities, from recreation centers to health services, did little to build their sense of belonging on campus, and too often instead increased their sense of alienation and social and material hardship.

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55(2), 162–170. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.gvsu.edu/10.1037/0022-006X. 55.2.162. Lawrence, C. (1990). If he hollers let him go: Regulating racist speech on campus. Duke Law Journal, 1990(3), 431–483. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 1372554. Lewis, V. (2012). Social energy and racial segregation in the university context. Social Science Quarterly, 93(1), 270–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15406237.2008.00548.x. MacKean, G. (2011, June). Mental health and well-being in post-secondary education settings: A literature and environmental scan to support planning and action in Canada. CACUSS Pre-Conference Workshop on Mental Health. Canadian Association of College and University Student Services Conference, Toronto, Canada. McClure, K. (2019). Examining the “amenities arms race” in higher education: Shifting from rhetoric to research. College Student Affairs Journal, 37 (2), 128–142. McLane, Y., & Kozinets, N. (2019). Spatiality, experiences, and the formation of place attachment at campus student life centers. College Student Journal, 53(1), 78–97. Muehlenkamp, J., Hilt, L., Ehlinger, P., & McMillan, T. (2015). Nonsuicidal self-injury in sexual minority college students: A test of theoretical integration. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 9(1), 16. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13034-015-0050-y. Munoz, L., Miller, R., & Poole, S. (2016). Professional student organizations and experiential learning activities: What drives student intentions to participate? Journal of Education for Business, 91(1), 45–51. https://doi.org/10. 1080/08832323.2015.1110553. Newhouse, M. (2013, Summer). Remembering the “T” in LGBT: Recruiting and supporting transgender students. Journal of College Admission, 22–27. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1011703.pdf. Ngo, B., Dyke, E., & LoBello, J. (2018). Connecting as “family” in educative relationships: Insights from a media program serving Hmong immigrant youth. Urban Education, 53(9), 1126–1153. https://doi.org/10.1177/004 2085917697202. Pantel, B. (2019). Students of size: An exploratory case study on a hidden climate. University of Northern Colorado. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/ dissertations/596. Perrault, E. (2018). Improving student knowledge and perceptions of primary care providers at campus health centers. Journal of American College Health, 66(8), 813–816. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2018.1434781. Prince, J. (2015). University student counseling and mental health in the United States: Trends and challenges. Mental Health & Prevention, 3(1–2), 5–10.

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Royster, L., & Marshall, O. (2008). The chronic illness initiative: Supporting college students with chronic illness needs at DePaul University. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 20(2), 120–125. Sidanius, J., Van Laar, C., Levin, S., & Sinclair, S. (2004). Ethnic enclaves and the dynamics of social identity on the college campus: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (1), 96–110. http:// dx.doi.org.ezproxy.gvsu.edu/10.1037/0022-3514.87.1.96. Strayhorn, T. (2018). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students. New York, NY: Routledge. Sun, J., Hagedorn, L., & Zhang, Y. (2016). Homesickness at college: Its impact on academic performance and retention. Journal of College Student Development, 57 (8), 943–957. Trockel, M., Barnes, M., & Egget, D. (2000). Health-related variables and academic performance among first-year college students: Implications for sleep and other behaviors. Journal of American College Health, 49(3), 125–131. University of Wisconsin System. (2019, December 9). Segregated university fees. UW Policies. Retrieved February 17, 2020, from https://www.wiscon sin.edu/uw-policies/uw-system-administrative-policies/segregated-universityfees/. Vaccaro, A. (2012). Campus microclimates for LGBT faculty, staff, and students: An exploration of the intersections of social identity and campus roles. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 49(4), 429–446. https://doi.org/ 10.1515/jsarp-2012-6473. Vaccaro, A., & Newman, B. (2016). Development of a sense of belonging for privileged and minoritized students: An emergent model. Journal of College Student Development, 57 (8), 925–942. Walton, G., & Cohen, G. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331(6023), 1447–1451. Wang, Y., Cullen, K., Yao, X., & Li, Y. (2013). Personality, freshmen proactive social behavior, and college transition: Predictors beyond academic strategies. Learning and Individual Differences, 23, 205–212. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.lindif.2012.09.010. Woodford, M., Howell, M., Kulick, A., & Silverschanz, P. (2013). “That’s so gay”: Heterosexual male undergraduates and the perpetuation of sexual orientation microagressions on campus. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28(2), 416–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260512454719.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

College is a big scam in every way. (James, Great Lakes University)

Abstract This chapter argues that local, state, and national public higher education policies and practices do not support low-income and otherwise marginalized students’ well-being or success, and often reproduce or exacerbate socio-economic inequities. We suggest that reform efforts should begin by asking values-based questions about the goals of public higher education, and end by crafting class-responsive policies. We propose three tools that policymakers can use to do so: university-based participatory action research, equity audits, and role model exercises. The chapter then proposes steps that every person can take to revitalize public support for public education, equity-producing policies, and democratic participation in the public arena. Keywords Educational reform · Values-based reform · Participatory action research · Equity audits · Role models · Educational equity

© The Author(s) 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3_6

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The Consequences of “Class-Neutral” University Policies and Practices This book has attempted to displace common assumptions about how college works for low- and moderate-income students, and what the status quo in public higher education can accomplish for US social mobility. By focusing on low-income students’ early college-going experiences at four very different four-year universities in Wisconsin, we have tried to raise questions about: (1) whether, how, and why public universities may be able to play a role in building a more socially and economically equitable country, and (2) whether, how, and why the college experience impacts low- and moderate-income students’ well-being. Unfortunately, we conclude that right now, these public college’s policies and practices often produce socio-economically inequitable experiences (and thus, perhaps, outcomes), and they sometimes do active damage to low-income students’ well-being. The focal students with the fewest financial resources, and particularly those who are also minoritized by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, or ability, suffered the greatest harm while in college. Data from many other studies across the country support these findings about the role of university policies and practices in fueling class inequity (e.g., Goldrick-Rab, 2016; Rauscher & Elliott III, 2014) and their role in fueling other forms of inequality (e.g., Renner & Moore, 2004). Our study also, like many others, provides evidence that university policies and practices often exacerbate low-income students’ struggles. The reasons that university policies and practices so often fuel inequality are complicated and, for the most part, not specific to higher education. They both reflect and (re)produce broader social inequalities in the country, which are also (re)produced by labor, tax, K-12 education, housing, transportation, food security, healthcare, and other social welfare and socio-economic systems. As Rauscher and Elliott III (2014) explain: The long U.S. legacy of unequal access to college degrees and assets are not separate issues, but—partly by design of those with economic and political power—represent two sides of the same coin. Assets beget educational advantage and educational advantage begets assets, reproducing inequality across generations. (p. 292)

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On average, and in keeping with national studies, the lower-income students1 in our study came into college with different needs than their wealthier peers, including having attended K-12 schools with less welltrained teachers and fewer college-preparation services (Renner & Moore, 2004), having postponed medical care (Wisk & Witt, 2012), having experienced food and/or housing insecurity (Gault, Reichlin & Román, 2014), and having to work very long hours and take out large loans to attend college. Some students’ long-standing, unmet health needs suddenly resulted in medical emergencies. Uninsured, but quickly learning that UHS would not provide the medical care they expected, students went to the emergency room for treatment. Thousands of dollars, and usually days or weeks later, students returned to class, but struggled to catch up. Added to their worries, loans taken from family members to pay healthcare bills created new familial stresses that the student had to manage, while university inflexibilities meant they could not take time off. With missed classes and large bills looming, students increased their work hours or student loans to try to begin digging out of the hole, but this in turn created new time constraints and new worries. University policies could make a difference in this cycle: GLU, for example, allowed students to carry their tuition and classes forward to the next semester, which lowered their financial burden and took the stress out of the potential of low grades that impact their financial aid and GPAs. But only one of the four campuses had a policy that supported low-income students’ well-being following a health emergency. Other students arrived on campus and began working immediately, unable to pay all of their bills until they received their first paycheck. These students’ opportunities to learn the campus layout, meet with their advisors and talk with other students, participate in study groups that

1 As Renner and Moore (2004) note, “Poverty is not race-neutral,” but poverty cannot be used as a proxy for race. Equity solutions that focus only on addressing wealth inequality will not effectively address other forms of marginalization and inequality—a much broader analysis (such as the social audit described below) is needed to accomplish this. Equally, a full account of students’ experiences of intersectional marginalization—and the role of university policies and practices in fueling them—would be needed to fully account for students’ experiences and for the reforms that would be needed to address them. We were not able to fully engage in this task, but believe that the tools provided in this chapter can help universities overcome this important analytic flaw by adopting more holistic social equity audit and participatory policy and practice reforms.

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formed early in the semester, go for a run or sign up to play on an intramural sports team, or just sleep as they settled into a new college routine were severely limited.2 The repercussions of not having a chance to spend some time learning about the campus and their fellow students, set up new routines, or visit with faculty and advisors included declining health and overall well-being, limited social connections, and limited academic support, which in turn made each week of school harder, and made emergencies almost impossible to navigate. These students’ experiences contrasted harshly with those of wealthier students with whom we worked, who often spent their first few weeks of school “just settling in,” joining teams and organizations, hanging out with new friends, and creating academic support networks on which they relied throughout the year. No campus had policies in place to address this initial inequity in opportunity to settle in, and students’ experiences with academic advisors were often fraught with what appeared to be low expectations for their capacity and quick recommendations to switch to less-desired majors when they struggled to be immediately successful. Low-income and otherwise minoritized students also faced different post-college realities than their wealthier peers, including US labor markets marked by racial, gender, geographic, and other discriminatory outcomes that they knew were likely to make it more difficult for them to pay back their loans and climb the economic ladder, even when they have the same degree as wealthier, white, male college graduates (Carnevale, Rose & Cheah, 2011; Gault et al., 2014; Lang & Lehmann, 2012); and greater family demands for financial support (Parrott, 2019), which arose in turn from the deeply inequitable distribution of wealth across the country. These needs and realities were not (or not fully) recognized or addressed by university policies and practices, and as a consequence, universities sometimes created new forms of precarity for students. Universities also undermined low-income and otherwise minoritized students’ well-being and success by adopting market-based management, budgeting, cost-sharing, and service provision business models that positioned students as consumers to whom universities were marketing goods—and, in the end, consumers from whom they needed to turn a profit. Our research shows that these changes, often called the new public management or new managerialism model (Deem & Brehony, 2 Presley (2013) reviews similar finding about the constraints faced by low-income students in other studies.

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2005; Lorenz, 2012), have particularly negative impacts on low-income students (Gault et al., 2014), and fuel inequality in experiences and outcomes (Armstrong & Hamilton, 2013; Hamilton, 2016), as many critical scholars have predicted and observed. Our study, like others (e.g., Turner, 2020), indicates that this market approach to public education undermines the goals of meritocracy, democracy, and equity. The consequences of adopting marketized policies are not only financial; they undercut the public mandate of public universities. They reorient teaching and learning toward markets, not toward public goods and civic outcomes; they attach differential values and worth to different students, programs, staff, faculty, and college services, thereby undermining the notion of equal rights and dignity; and they increasingly call on students to rely on private resources of all sorts (economic, familial, social, academic, etc.) to generate the expected benefits of college (Connell, 2019; Hamilton, 2016). Because private resources are so inequitably distributed, greater inequalities are fueled over time.

Class-Responsive Policies and Practices University policies and practices could address these realities. To do so, however, universities would need to understand and then directly address the inequities in students’ resources and experiences coming into college. That is, universities would have to adopt class-responsive policies, practices, and budgets that are designed to address the particular needs of low-income students. No policy is socially “neutral.” All policies reflect classed, raced, gendered, abled, and sexed assumptions or biases. When policies are declared to be “neutral” in these regards, they almost always reproduce existing biases. Thus, for example, “race neutral” policies generally reinforce white privilege (Renner & Moore, 2004), while “class neutral” policies generally reinforce wealth privilege (Rauscher & Elliott III, 2014). This is exactly the pattern revealed in this book: there was no Machiavellian administrator attempting to harm low-income students on the campuses where we worked. But such actors are not needed: policies that do not directly and purposefully attempt to transform existing inequalities almost always reinforce and perpetuate them. And we live in the most wealth- and race-inequitable moment in the United States in the last century. It will not be easy for colleges to work against the grain and institute policies and practices that achieve greater socio-economic equity in

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students’ college experiences (and, hopefully, outcomes). Public universities have been struggling for decades with state budget cuts and the complex pressures that they engender. These struggles overlay the biased institutional logics, policies, and practices built into campuses built to serve White, wealthy men (Grollman, 2015). And the logics and policies that are politically palatable and readily at hand to respond to these cuts generally increase inequality and undermine the public mandate of the university (Saunders, 2010; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2010). As Burd (quoted in Dill, 2020) describes, in explaining why universities’ financial aid systems have increasingly benefited wealthy students instead of needy students: “…the emphasis becomes more on raising revenue and on rising up the rankings, and in all those ways creates incentives for the schools to go after wealthier students…” We have seen this logic—a logic of elitism and of market share competition—play out in every component of low- and moderate-income students’ experiences. From admission and financial aid policies that benefit wealthy students who attended wealthy high schools, to new student centers and residence halls with high-end amenities but no cheap options, to healthcare services that provide free condoms but charge significant fees for female-controlled contraceptive methods, to mental health services that will only treat “stress” but not severe depression, to thoughtless admissions policies that deeply constrain low-income students’ opportunities for admission into desired STEM majors, to administrators who readily dismiss the attacks minoritized students face when they try to use the university services for which they pay, lowincome students face high and unique barriers to surviving and thriving on all four campuses. Research on student outcomes and on student experiences around the country appears to reinforce these trends almost without exception. Our common national assumption that colleges are protective, equitable, and equity-generating must be challenged. Better yet, it is time for us to affirm again that our goal is to provide for equitable access to quality education for all qualified students, and then align policies, practices, and rewards with this goal, starting with student funding. As The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Aid’s 2001 report stated: Three decades ago, there was unanimous agreement to the nation’s access goal: low-income students who are academically prepared must have the same educational opportunity as their middle- and upper-income peers.

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Today that opportunity… is all but ruled out for increasing numbers of low-income students by records levels of unmet needs. (quoted in Renner & Moore, 2004, pp. 237–238)

Low-income students’ opportunities to attend college under reasonable funding conditions (without excessive work or debt) did not degrade by chance. They degraded because of policy decisions that favored wealthy students over low-income students. State politicians’ decisions to disinvest in public higher education and to shift from need-based to merit-based aid in the 1990s, for example, deeply impacted low-income students’ ability to access college. Ficklen and Stone (2002) note that the 2001 report compiled clear evidence that: …substituting middle-income affordability and merit for access as policy goals caused unmet need—the portion of college expenses not covered by the expected family contribution (EFC) and student aid, including workstudy and loans—to reach unprecedented levels.

Later processes of public university fund-raising that have prioritized attracting out-of-state students who pay higher tuition rates have had similar consequences. As Gusterson (2017) describes: These processes are transforming many state universities from meritocratically organized institutions that facilitated social mobility for middle- and working-class kids of nearby families at a reasonable price into institutions slanted toward the predilections of wealthier nonlocal students. (p. 440).3

National and global ranking systems similarly produce disincentives for universities to support low-income students, for example, by penalizing them for accepting students with low SAT scores, even though SAT scores are known to be highly correlated with class and race (Geiser, 2015). As the Washington Post’s Bridget Burns (September 18, 2018) declared: “Too often, rankings have asked America’s college and university leaders to face the tough choice of investing in students from low-income families or weeding them out in a quest for prestige.” She explains how ranking systems penalize universities for taking students with low SAT scores, treating “exclusivity as a proxy for quality.” 3 Jaquette, Curs, and Posselt (2016) chart the consequences of this shift to attracting out-of-state students with merit-based aid on the racial composition of state schools.

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The good news, however, is that if policies and practices can feed inequity, they can foster equity as well. Some scholars whose work aims to increase higher education affordability believe that the problem facing low-income students is a lack of information. They focus on the need to provide students (and, perhaps, the government) with better information about the real costs of college, and the real benefits that colleges offer students, so that individuals and families can make more informed investment choices. Many of these scholars believe it is important that all college students pay to attend college, because they receive personal benefits after graduation (for e.g., increased salary) and because without such a personal investment of money and time, they might not value college enough. This is not the issue we saw low-income students confronting. As our work has shown, there are certainly information gaps that make it hard for students to plan for the actual costs of college. Efforts to increase students’ access to better information about COA, including supporting (or shaming) institutions into doing a much better job of estimating or revealing these costs might yield some benefits for students. So might more transparent financial aid systems, which both collect better data from students and families in order to calculate real need, and which require institutions to clearly communicate with students about their financial aid packages, including how they function and if they will receive significantly different levels of aid from the university in their second year, as so many colleges now attempt to entice students with first-year grant incentives that disappear their second year (Burd, Fishman, Keane, & Habbert [2018] discuss this issue at length). Burns (2018) also suggests that public information on Pell student graduation rates (which universities do not always make public), and on retention and graduation gaps between low-income and wealthy students, could help students compare different universities and provide one point of information potentially related to the quality of low-income students’ experiences on campus. However, information gaps are only a small part of the problem. Laura’s story is indicative of this: Laura was a first-generation college student, whose goal was to complete a criminal justice degree at GSU, and after graduation, become a police officer. Her parents had not gone to college themselves; they had been living on her father’s wages working for the Department of Transportation, since her mother had lost her job two years before. Her parents were ethically opposed to taking on debt for any reason, and so though they

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approved of her goal to become a police officer, they initially refused to provide her the information that she needed from them to file the FAFSA and apply for financial aid. Laura tried to navigate the process on her own but no one in her family or her high school advised her on how financial aid and payments worked. She entered college with some fundamental misunderstandings: she believed that GSU would “open a tab” for her and allow her to continue in school while she paid what she could, when she could. She expected that she would be allowed to set out a consistent payment plan after graduation, when she would be repaying her loans from her wages as a police officer. No one was there to inform her otherwise, and she was shattered when, during her first semester, GSU told her she had to pay up or leave: “I felt that you are charged all this stuff, but you don’t have to pay until your senior year or when you graduate; that’s what everybody made it sound like– ‘oh yeah, you don’t have to pay anything until you graduate.’” It is clear that accurate information would have helped Laura navigate the process of college financing and understand from the start the kinds of resources that she would need to be able to support herself while in college. However, it is also clear that college was not affordable for Laura. She was eventually able to get her parents to provide her with the information she needed to submit her FAFSA. However, she was a semester behind in payments, and so what she received in grants and loans left her $2,000 short, due immediately. With no additional savings, no more support from her family, and no willingness on GSU’s part to give her more time to find a solution, Laura left college, returned home, and started looking for work to pay back her loans from her one semester of college. Laura began working and volunteering at jobs that related to her interest in police, fire, and emergency medical technician careers and began doing research into how she might take online courses, one at a time, to work toward her career goals.

Fundamentally, as we hope this book has shown, the problem is systemic, not individual. Providing more information to students about how to navigate a university system that fuels inequality may help some students navigate it with their eyes open. But it will not change the unequal and damaging experiences students must confront, and it probably will not change the outcomes produced by such a system. Our research does not support current arguments that the roots of students’ struggles lie in their own backgrounds, capabilities, or work ethics. Certainly, these influence their pathways through college. But federal

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and state policies and the public universities that these students are attending are putting up barriers to their success instead of nurturing it. Low-income students’ needs, experiences, and well-being are not driving federal, state, or public universities’ policies, practices, or funding decisions. And business models exacerbate this problem. From a business perspective, low-income, in-state students are not the best bet as current consumers or future alumni: wealthy and/or out-of-state students are. But from the perspective of a public institution tasked with nurturing the next generation of leaders, these students will determine our shared future.

Asking Values-Based Questions Our research raises values-based questions for both the general public and the universities they fund. First and foremost, our research leads us to ask: What are the values and mission, and therefore who are the students, around which the public university should organize itself? Asking such values-based questions provides a different starting point for thinking about university reform than asking socially “neutral” “what” and “how” questions about how to balance a budget or address an immediate political pressure (Drabinski & Walter, 2016). A number of educational philosophers and leaders have laid out frameworks for how we might ask “why” questions that can center a discussion of values, purpose, and meaning in our efforts to reshape higher education policies and practices (to name just a few: Brighouse & Unterhalter, 2010; Dei, 2016; Holmwood, 2011; Mamdani, 2007; Marginson, 2007; McPherson & Schapiro, 2007). Asking such questions of our research reveals that none of the universities with whom we worked were clearly and consistently valuing the well-being and success of low-income and otherwise minoritized students. It also reveals that there were important and real differences in universities’ policies and practices. Tracing such differences can help us move toward better policies and practices. Sadly, in our study, the university whose policies and practices most consistently supported low-income and otherwise marginalized students’ positive social experiences was also the university that had the highest out-of-pocket cost for low-income students and the largest graduation

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gap between Black and White students. It was not by chance4 that this university had both the highest sticker price and the most financially needy students, many of whom were students of color. The university’s budget was repeatedly targeted by the state government to receive higher cuts than other campuses in the system. Given the history of the campus and its student population, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that these higher-than-average cuts represented deeply racist and long-standing, discriminatory politics in Wisconsin, which were designed to marginalize these students’ educational experiences—and the one campus that best served them. The Wisconsin legislature’s 2014 attack on campus-based services for minoritized students represented a similar impetus. While the particular politics surrounding this campus are unique to Wisconsin, elsewhere, state funding practices often reward colleges for elitist outcomes and cut the budgets of universities that serve and value marginalized students’ success instead. These reward structures are in turn shaped and reinforced by other national and international institutions and logics, including, for example, US News & World Report ’s college rankings (Jovanovic, 2017). There are evident reasons for the universities in our study to try to compete for resources and privilege by adopting elitist, market logics to drive their policies and practices. It is completely sensible, from an economist’s perspective (and many universities are led by economists), to look at a public university’s budget deficits, state funding, incentives, and market position, and decide that the university’s best bet is to attract wealthy, out-of-state students who perform very well on standardized tests. However, to attract such students effectively, the university must become (inter)nationally competitive. It must make policy and funding decisions that cater to wealthier students’ wants, from providing them with the best merit aid package possible, to building residence halls and student centers that have a range of amenities they value, to rewarding college students who have the time and money to participate in extracurriculars and leadership activities. However, in a deeply class-segregated country (and world), wealthier students’ wants do not usually overlap much with lower-income students’ needs.

4 See, for example, Goldrick-Rab, 2016 for a discussion of these processes in Wisconsin higher education.

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We can now perhaps engage the question of what it would mean for a university to center the well-being and success of their most marginalized students from a different perspective, asking both what public values should drive the public university, and what political, social, economic, and relational logics would need to shift in order to center those values in practice.

Tools to Support Institutional Change Public universities and state governments have to decide who they are serving and why. We believe that public universities’ central mission should be to provide an affordable,5 high-quality education that is organized around improving well-being in the present and the future for the neediest qualified students. To do so, the universities in our study— and most public four-year universities around the United States—would need to adopt policies and practices that deliberately respond to lowerincome students’ needs and experiences and that decenter historically White, wealthy, straight institutional logics and cultures. Universities are complex organizations, with many different actors, systems, processes, and practices interacting to shape students’ experiences. Institutional change is, of course, a tremendously large area of

5 While there are important debates to be had about what constitutes affordability and how to best allocate funding for both higher education in particular and the education sector in general (we agree here with Baum’s [2016] point that public support for higher education is essential, but it does not appear to be as important to equitable development as, for example, public investment in preschool), we draw here on the 2001 Report’s definition, which demands that low-income students not be saddled with significant debt post-graduation and not have to work more than 20 hours a week in order to fund their education. One benefit of this definition is that it highlights students’ experiences while in college, as well as their experiences after college, in determining “affordability.” However, it does not answer the question about what constitutes “significant debt.” We think Dannenberg & Voight (2013) lay out an excellent starting point for conceptualizing appropriate debt levels: they propose that students whose families are in the bottom 40% of household incomes receive a debt-free education, while those in the bottom 80% receive no-interest loans with income-based repayment. While determining household income, the amount of money needed to cover all appropriate costs associated with receiving a college education, and how to manage an income-based repayment process in a costeffective manner are all important next questions, the key point here is to recognize that tremendous wealth inequality requires differentiated public responses, and that, for the students from the lowest-income families in such an economic system, no debt is the right level of debt to require that a student take on.

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study in many disciplines, and we do not pretend here to provide a comprehensive review of even a corner of this area of study. Instead, we begin this section by noting that there are a number of tools that can support universities in accomplishing the goal of reforming their policies, practices, and budgets to be class-responsive. Such reform efforts must be nested in a firm, widely shared, values-based commitment to change, because such change is not easy. It will take a shared mission and commitment from many different parts of campus and the community to achieve. We outline three tools below, with which we have had personal experience and success in supporting institutional change: participatory action for institutional change, the equity audit, and the role model approach. We then turn our focus from steps that universities might take to become more class-responsive to discuss the roles that the general public, and voters in particular, can play to: (1) support public universities in undertaking this kind of internal reform and in rewarding universities that attempt to reclaim this public mission, and (2) pressure key local, state, and federal policymakers to change their policies and budget practices, in order to support more equitable public higher education outcomes for all. Participatory Action Research to Support Institutional Change Institutional change that aims to increase equity cannot, we believe, be rooted in top-down and hierarchical processes. For universities interested in rooting institutional change in research processes, we recommend the use of well-crafted participatory action research approaches, which, like the social audit processes described below, can democratize and transform knowledge generation and begin the process of having diverse campus groups (e.g., administrators, students, faculty, staff) build new communities of practice and care together. Participatory Action Research (PAR) processes can and should include the full range of campus actors in the end, but deliberately start with those who are most marginalized in existing systems and who are the purported target of reform efforts (in this case, low-income and otherwise minoritized students, short-term workers, adjunct faculty). There are a number of university-based initiatives to support students and faculty in conducting research on students’ experiences in college; we were not able to identify similar initiatives about staff experiences. Many of these initiatives utilize participatory or participatory action research

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approaches, which are driven by students’ own experiences and interests and are designed to provide support for students to enact changes that address research findings. Large-scale, publicly available efforts of these sorts include the University of Toronto’s Investigation of the University Project (https://ethnographylab.ca/category/ethnography-of-the-uni versity/) and the University of Illinois’ Ethnography of the University Initiative (http://www.eui.illinois.edu/), both of which are associated with large anthropological methods courses. The Minnesota Campus Compact partnered with Youthprise to run the Enhancing College Success Through Participatory Action Research pilot project (https:// mncampuscompact.org/what-we-do/initiatives/enhancing-college-acc ess-and-success-through-participatory-action-research/) and provide training on participatory action research methods. The UW-Madison Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions has worked closely with Hmong undergraduates to conduct participatory action research on a project called “Our HMoob American College Paj Ntaub.” There are also books that provide primers (of a sort) in conducting youth-led participatory action research in schools and universities, such as Cammarota and Fine’s 2019 edited volume, Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion; and Anderson’s 2017 article titled “Participatory action research (PAR) as democratic disruption: New public management and educational research in schools and universities,” in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Somekh’s (2009) book, The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research,6 offers some insights into staff-led institutional change in educational spaces, as does Caro-Bruce, Flessner, Klehr, and Zeichner’s 2007 book, Creating Equitable Classrooms Through Action Research. Equity Audits Social audits have the potential to provide information, processes, and accountability frameworks that are multidimensional, rich in data, democratizing, and enabling of new perspectives and shared visions for institutional improvement. They can help university communities come together around shared values to align their efforts and build a new kind of community together. They can also, of course, simply reinforce the status

6 See, also, Somekh and Zeichner (2009).

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quo. Anyone interested in using a social audit approach should take care to review the research on audits and their outcomes and assure that the process that is selected by the university is centered—that is, begins, continues, and ends—in low-income students’, staff’s, and faculty’s experiences and needs, and supports these actors in playing a central role in reform-setting. Well-crafted social audits require that knowledge production about the university, its processes, and its outcomes be decentered, from administrators and leaders, to the full university body (and in these cases, to low-income members of the community in particular). This work cannot be an add-on to a limited number of people’s jobs, and it cannot be asked of low-income actors without adequate remuneration. Social audit models have become more popular over the last few decades. Early models were often developed for use by US companies that aimed to be more “socially conscious” (e.g., Bauer & Fenn, 1977; Davis & Bromstrom, 1975), though in recent decades they have been more often developed and used in Europe or by international organizations involved in government or non-profit programming. These newer social audit models (sometimes called equity audit models), provide concrete tools that can be used by members of an organization7 to audit their own organization’s policies, programs, practices, and budgets in order to determine whether they support social equity, and to provide concrete information and processes that the institution can undertake to improve its own practices. There are a particularly strong set of equity audit tools that have been developed around gender equity. Gender Audit tools were developed in the decades after many international organizations and governments signed on to international gender equality declarations, but then no systemic change occurred. They are designed to uncover implicit and explicit organizational practices (including policies, programs, projects, services, budgets, structures, and practices) that fuel inequality, so that these can be systematically addressed (Chizzola, DeMicheli, & Vingelli, 2018).

7 Social or equity audits can also be implemented by outside evaluators; though having external team members can be essential to opening up space for an honest audit, if institutional actors do not participate in the audit process and then lead the reform agenda, audits seldom result in change.

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Social audits often include both an internal and an external component,8 and they usually aim to provide both a roadmap for action and an accountability framework that institutions can use to chart their own progress toward achieving greater social equity. Most (and we would say the best) social audits are deliberately participatory in nature and are based on the assumption that a more socially equitable institution can only be built from processes that include all members of the institution in research, analysis, and action on the problem.9 The International Labor Organisation’s 2012 publication, A Manual for Gender Audit Facilitators, is an example of one such participatory research and action audit model. Social audit models are generally less well-known in the United States, though the quality improvement models from which they draw may be more familiar to university stakeholders. In higher education, they have been used and reported on in a number of ways. For example, Equity audits have been developed and conducted by educational leadership and teacher education programs, often as a tool to support school leaders in identifying existing inequities and then holding their institutions accountable for movement toward more equitable outcomes (e.g., Branch & Leigh, 2017; Capper & Young, 2015). And Harris and Hopson (2008) report on the policy changes and other outcomes attributed to Educational Leadership doctoral students conducting equity audits at their university. Gurm (2004) provides an example of a social audit conducted at a Canadian university to study and improve the work environment of employees. Many US universities (e.g., University of Missouri system, University of Iowa), provide full reports on their diversity audits (the type of equity audit most commonly conducted in the last decades), while Chesler (1998) reviews diversity audit approaches in higher education.

8 See, for example, the European Institute for Gender Equality’s Web site on the process: https://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/methods-tools/gender-audit 9 Owen, Swift, Humphrey, and Bowerman (2000) point to the potential dangers of the corporatization of social audits or their use as nothing more than a public relations campaign if the audit model does not center democratic goals in investigation, decisionmaking, and accountability.

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Role Models There are a number of four-year colleges (and many two-year colleges) that can serve as role models for public universities that aim to reshape policies, practices, and budgets to support low-income students’ (and faculty and staff) well-being and success. A university interested in finding such role models can approach this task in at least two ways: first, the university might conduct extensive case study research on a shortlist of the top public universities that have achieved externally measurable, desired outcomes (e.g., highest graduation rates for Pell grant recipients or racially minoritized students). The university might (or might not) decide to try to match their and their state’s characteristics with those of potential role models as closely as possible, particularly around the student population currently served. Or, a public college might try to identify colleges that are extremely different than they are, but that do a remarkable job at achieving particular outcomes. For example, they might identify community colleges that do a much better job than they do at having low-income students pass developmental courses, or they might look to a nearby Tribal college or historically black college or university that does a remarkable job at serving students who are racially minoritized on their own campus. A second approach to identifying role models might follow this first effort. Large-scale data and the outcomes that it makes evident (pass rates, graduation rates, etc.) are important, but they are very limited measures of students’ daily experiences. Universities interested in identifying role models must agree internally on what outcomes they hope to achieve, and then are encouraged to start—but not end—with existing public data. Members of the university community (administrators, faculty, staff, and students alike) can reach out to colleagues, attend conferences and meetings, and talk with trusted community leaders to generate a list of institutions and of groups or leaders that are perceived as excelling at achieving desired outcomes that are hidden in large-scale data. This search can be internal as well—even universities that generally fail at achieving particular outcomes may have units within their own universities that excel in these regards. Universities are likely to identify different role models for different aspects of the reform process and the outcomes that they hope to achieve. For example, universities might identify role model universities that are examining their own practices carefully; these role models may differ

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from the role model universities that have already achieved certain desired outcomes. Below, we provide some brief examples of potential starting points for identifying role models and best practices. Role Models in Action A number of four-year, public universities have become well-known as being particularly effective at supporting low-income and otherwise marginalized students through the college experience. Their students generally graduate at much higher rates than similar students in other four-year colleges, but they also report more positive experiences and various measures of well-being while in college. Many have innovative policies, programs, and partnerships that support these efforts. For example, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has received widespread praise for their student graduation rates, but also extensive recognition for their collaborative partnership models (including participatory research) with local communities. UMBC’s vision statement reads: Our UMBC community redefines excellence in higher education through an inclusive culture that connects innovative teaching and learning, research across disciplines, and civic engagement. We will advance knowledge, economic prosperity, and social justice by welcoming and inspiring inquisitive minds from all backgrounds.

UMBC’s leadership team includes nationally renowned leaders in minoritized students’ college success; for example, their long-serving President, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, was the chair of the National Academy of Sciences 2011 report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads, and he served as chair on President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African-Americans. He describes the university’s particular strength as having “excellence and inclusion go handin-hand.” The university touts the care that members of the university have for one another and their community partners, and this care and respect are reflected in a wide range of awards. The university received an award from the Carnegie Foundation as a leading community-engaged university; it is regularly ranked as a top university for student and faculty outcomes by Times Higher Education, US News & World Report, the Princeton Review, and others; and it was also ranked by the Baltimore

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Sun newspaper as one of the top ten large employers in the Baltimore area—the only university or public entity included on this list. Literature on universities that “outperform” their peers in firstgeneration and minoritized student graduation rates indicates that these universities often have “pipeline” and other recruiting programs that start working with students while they are still in middle or high school, and continue specialized support programs throughout college that focus on creating a tight-knit community for students and providing academic and financial support. They often provide training to faculty and staff on implicit and explicit bias and provide extensive training to support improved interactive and teaching practices. They often hire specialized staff to support students—for example, student services and student counseling staff with extensive experience working with minoritized students. These efforts, as one university administrator described them, allow colleges to be “student ready,” just like students are expected to be “college ready.” The best of these institutions create shared communities that draw together groups that are, in universities and in wider society, often segregated from one another. Multi-class, multi-generational, multi-racial and -ethnic, multi-role university communities foster true care for one another as individuals and as members of the whole. They nurture and celebrate visionary leadership for the whole, they assess and reward administrators, faculty, and staff who improve marginalized students’ experiences and outcomes, and they commonly have robust partnerships with surrounding communities and K-12 schools. Examining the literature on best practices gleaned from universities that have done better than average at supporting low-income and otherwise minoritized students’ well-being and completion can serve as an essential first step in helping public universities think through the resources, services, and cultural shifts that they might need to undertake to transform student outcomes. Visits to these role model universities can provide new insights and create communities of practice to support change. However, here again, universities need to be careful that the process of identifying and adopting best practices from other universities is not used to elide the hard work that each unique university needs to do to transform their own practices. For example, BU and RSU fulfill most of the best practices described above, but minoritized students described experiences of disrespect, a lack of belonging, administrative disinterest in their well-being, and physical danger. Many of the universities’ policies

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and practices designed to support minoritized students created safe—but segregated—spaces for different groups of students. Students who participated in these spaces found some relief, but the campus itself did not change. And students who could not participate in these segregated spaces found no relief at all. Evidently, this approach to supporting minoritized students has deep limitations, and these would need to be acknowledged and addressed directly.

Nurturing Public Support for Public Universities While public universities have essential work to do and reforms to undertake in order to assure the success and well-being of low-income students, every person in every state can play a key role in supporting this work and in assuring that public universities fulfill their potential to serve as equitygenerating institutions that support socio-economic mobility and equity, democratic decision-making, and civic engagement. As this book has shown, state- and university-level policies and budgets too often have a significant, negative impact on low-income students’ access to and experiences in college. There is growing recognition that the status quo should not continue. People are upset that college tuition has increased so much, and that public universities don’t always seem to understand or care about people in their own state (Cramer, 2016). But what are the next steps? There are a lot of ideas about how to reform public higher education, many of which now have a strong research base from which we can draw lessons about what kinds of reforms might really impact lowincome students’ well-being and success in college. We review some of them below. But in our estimation, we think the most important change that can occur is that people in each state can start talking together about why public education matters and what values they hold for public education and then can start mobilizing to increase funding to public schools (pre-K through college) and to increase direct grant aid to the most marginalized students and the public institutions that serve them well. This means writing letters to elected officials, joining or starting social campaigns, and building movements. It means pressing for new ways of thinking about what should be publicly funded and why—ways that connect to shared values and shared care. It also means voting for politicians who promise to re-invest in public schools and who promise to adopt policies and ideas that support the most marginalized students

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and schools. For example, foster children in the United States usually lose access to public support for their daily needs at the moment that they become potential college students. They are among the most financially marginalized children in the United States. And in most states, there is no system of support to assure they can access college. It would cost each taxpayer in Wisconsin less than a penny a year to fully fund college for all foster children. In 2018, a bipartisan group of politicians in the statehouse passed a bill to fund all foster care children’s college tuition. The expected cost: under $500,000 (Richmond, 2018). The bill failed in the state senate. This is the kind of effort around which large coalitions could be built and pressure could be brought to bear on politicians to do the right thing and assure that the most marginalized youth in our society receive public support to build a bright future. In so doing, this bill opens up a new conversation about what it means to support one another’s future. A financial calculation about revenue to the state and to colleges can thus become a conversation about values. And it is by shifting this values conversation (not by arguing over budgets) that we believe public support for publicly-funded schooling can be rebuilt. To that end, we hope that this book serves as a call to arms to each reader to become involved in state and federal efforts to improve the affordability of quality higher education. We think that some of the efforts most likely to improve low-income and otherwise marginalized students’ experiences and success are: • increasing base funding for all public colleges (two-year and fouryear), but particularly for colleges whose student body, faculty, and staff are largely low-income or otherwise minoritized (including by class, race and ethnicity, and geography); • lobbying the Federal government to improve the mechanisms by which we calculate student aid (FAFSA) and student costs (COA); • radically increasing funding for need-based (as opposed to meritbased) grant aid; • increasing funding for federal work-study programs (which can provide students more stable and remunerative employment without travel time, while also supporting university needs); and • providing new funds for innovative university efforts in academics, housing and dining, auxiliary services, and student-centered services that have an evidence base for their success in supporting

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low-income and otherwise marginalized students’ well-being and achievement in college. There are a lot of ideas that are circulating about how to revolutionize access to public higher education. Some of the more common are free college (e.g., Goldrick-Rab & Kendall, 2014), new forms of financial aid (Goldrick-Rab, Kelchen, Harris, & Benson, 2016; Scott-Clayton, 2015), college promises (Perna & Riepe, 2016), and state guarantees (D’Allesandro, 2017; UW-Madison Office of Student Financial Aid, 2018). All of these hold promise and pose potential pitfalls. In examining them, and in questioning policymakers and politicians about what they will accomplish, we hope each reader will ask themselves: What public values does each proposal reflect, and how will the most marginalized students likely fare? How much do they allow public universities to maintain the mission of combining “…nearly universal access with the highest quality in teaching and research” (Newfield, 2008, p. 3)? And, what level of oversight is cost-effective, given that the national and global evidence is clear: direct transfers to low-income people almost always result in beneficial use of funds (Hulme, Hanlon, & Barrientos, 2012). Lastly, in thinking about how taxpayer money is used to fund higher education, we hope every taxpayer and every citizen will ask: when, why, and to what ends are public funds used to subsidize wealthy students, wealthy institutions, or for-profit companies? For example, Woodhouse (2015) reminds us: And while public universities struggle to persuade state legislatures to keep subsidizing them, private universities receive hidden government subsidies by virtue of their tax-exempt status. According to Nexus, these subsidies amount to around $41,000 per student at the wealthiest universities and an astonishing $105,000 per student at Princeton. Compare that to the subsidies the state of New Jersey gave to two nearby public schools in 2013: Rutgers received $12,500 per student and Essex Community College, $2,400 per student. (n.p.)

For-profit universities are the fastest-growing sector in higher education, for a variety of complex and troubling reasons (Cottom, 2017). As a category, they impose higher costs on students, and particularly on racially minoritized students (Snyder, deBrey, & Dillow, 2016), have low postattendance earning rates, and result in greater levels of debt and loan

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default for students (Deming, Goldin, & Katz, 2012). Public funding for their operations should, in our opinion, be withdrawn entirely in almost all cases. Finally, as each of the students’ stories in this book make clear, the patterns of inequality, disinvestment, and marginalization that are evident in public higher education and in public colleges are also evident across the country’s education system, and they infuse every major social sector of the United States. Thus, advocacy and policy reforms that support low-income college students are not and should not be limited to public higher education. Changes in tax, health care, public transportation, food security, and housing policies, for example, could have transformative impacts on low-income students’ and their families’ well-being. Indeed, public universities (or public education more broadly) cannot singlehandedly transform patterns of increasing socio-economic inequality. But they can play a key role in doing so, and it is worth fighting to assure that they have the public support and resources needed to fulfill this promise.

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Index

A Abjection, 32 Academic fee(s), 34, 40, 46, 47 Academic supplies, 31 Achievement, 2, 10, 144 Actual costs, 7, 8, 11, 66, 69, 130 Actual family contributions, 9 ADA, 68, 69 Affordability, 10, 69, 130, 134, 143 African-American, 101, 140 All-inclusive, 94 Anti-poor, 22 Asian American, 59 Asian American community, 59 Athletic classes, 46 Athletic(s), 93, 95–97, 118 Auxiliary services, 36, 47, 48, 143 B Background checks, 45 BadgerCare, 109, 111 Barrier(s), 4, 23, 32, 38, 85, 103, 128, 132 Basic needs, 64–66, 88, 92, 96, 100

Best practices, 140, 141 Bigoted remarks, 58 Bigotry, 95 Block(s), 51, 81, 82, 96 Budget, 5, 12, 13, 35, 39, 46, 50, 54, 83, 103, 116, 117, 119, 127, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 142, 143 Budgetary reforms, 28 Budget cut, 2, 5, 35, 37, 38, 46, 47, 93, 100, 105, 128 Bundling, 53 Bundling strategies, 52, 53 C Campus climate, 39 Campus culture(s), 5, 39, 46, 92 Campus policies, 49, 64, 119 Campus services, 49, 65, 113 Childcare, 22, 75, 100 Citizenship, 23 Class, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 20, 22–24, 31, 32, 36, 39–44, 47–49, 51–54, 57, 58, 60, 74, 76, 84, 85, 87,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 N. Kendall et al., The True Costs of College, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53861-3

151

152

INDEX

95, 100, 112–114, 116, 124, 125, 127, 129, 143 Class-differentiated, 41, 50, 118, 119 Class-responsive policies, 127 Class-responsive policies and practices, 50, 127 Classroom buildings, 36 Class size(s), 35, 36 Clickers, 53 College affordability, 6, 11, 18, 22, 27 College completion, 2 College cost(s), 4, 8, 9, 11, 18, 27, 64, 74 College degree(s), 1, 3, 27, 124 College experience(s), 4, 6, 7, 10, 17, 21, 23, 28, 39–41, 54, 61, 65, 69, 70, 92, 94, 97, 98, 103, 119, 124, 128, 140 College student(s), 2, 4, 10, 18–22, 27, 28, 74, 75, 77–79, 107, 108, 115, 130, 133, 143, 145 Coming-of-age, 21 Commute, 64, 68, 72, 75, 97 Commuter, 67, 68, 75, 115 Commuter student(s), 67, 76, 79, 94, 96, 103, 106 Commuting, 25, 41, 68, 71, 75–77, 86, 96 Convenience charge, 46 Cost-effective, 37, 85, 134, 144 Cost estimates, 68, 79 Cost of Attendance (COA), 6–9, 11, 25, 26, 31–34, 42, 45–47, 51–54, 59, 66–68, 92–94, 112, 130, 143 Cost-recovery models, 47, 48 Counseling, 98, 115, 141 Counseling services, 94, 101, 109, 113–116, 118 Counselor, 114–116 Course drop deadline, 47

Course load, 10 Course materials, 31, 53 Course requirements, 43 Credit, 9, 10, 34, 43, 45, 46, 73 Credit hour(s), 93 D Dance, 46 Debt, 3, 7–10, 12, 20, 22, 28, 56, 65, 67, 69, 114–116, 129, 130, 134, 144 Department of Education, 6 Developmental courses, 32, 38, 43, 57, 139 Differentiated tuition, 32, 38 Dining dollars, 81, 82 Disability(ies), 2, 6, 19, 21, 69, 97 Discrimination, 8, 58 Dormitory, 65, 68–71, 74, 86–88, 93, 106 Dorm(s), 36, 40, 41, 69, 70, 82, 85, 94 E Economic security, 1 Emergency(ies), 40, 108–113, 116–118, 125, 126, 131 Emergency rooms (ER), 21, 108, 111, 125 Emotional, 24, 28, 41, 54, 57, 58, 64, 76, 77, 98, 103–106, 112, 115 Emotional risks, 18 Emotional well-being, 12 Equipment rentals, 49 Equity, 24, 42, 125, 127, 128, 130, 135, 137, 138, 142 Equity audit models, 137 Ethnicity, 32, 38, 95, 101, 107, 119, 124, 143 Ethnographic research, 27, 104

INDEX

Ethnographic study, 11, 27 Ethnography, 136 Expected Family contribution (EFC), 6, 8, 9, 25, 37, 59, 129 Experienced costs, 72, 79 Extracurricular, 40, 70, 75, 133 Extracurricular activities, 44, 45, 56 Extra fees, 31 F Farm, 8, 76 Farm debt, 8 Farming, 40 Federal financial aid, 9 Federal poverty line, 19 Federal work-study program, 143 Fee-for-service, 51 Fee(s), 6, 7, 21, 32–34, 36–39, 42–51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 69–74, 80, 82, 88, 92–94, 101–103, 105, 106, 110, 114, 115, 128 Female-identified, 20, 43, 106 Financial, 2, 3, 9, 18, 21, 24, 25, 28, 32, 37–40, 42, 54, 57, 59, 60, 64, 69, 73–77, 86, 87, 97, 102–105, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117, 125–127, 141 Financial aid, 6–11, 24, 37, 59, 60, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 84, 95, 108, 113, 125, 128, 130, 131, 144 Financial aid package(s), 24, 60, 68, 103, 130 Financial hardship, 60 Financial precarity, 12, 97 Financial resources, 7, 20, 21, 40, 47, 112, 124 Financial risks, 18, 64, 73 Financial stresses, 21, 33 Fines, 49–51, 71, 136 First-generation, 19, 141 First-generation college students, 130

153

Fitness, 95, 98, 106 Food, 7–10, 21, 22, 28, 42, 64–67, 69, 70, 74–80, 82–88, 92, 96, 100, 105, 112, 125 Food insecurity, 19, 20, 77, 78, 83–85 Food pantry, 78, 83, 84, 93, 96, 100 Food services, 47, 78, 80, 84, 85, 118 Food stamps, 87 Four-year colleges, 3, 5, 11, 18, 78, 108, 139, 140 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), 8, 9, 75, 76, 131, 143 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE), 35 G Gender, 2, 6, 18, 24, 38, 42, 95, 101, 107, 109, 119, 124, 126, 137, 138 Government programs, 21 Grades, 7, 57, 59, 106, 108, 114, 115, 125 Grant aid, 37, 69, 142, 143 Grant(s), 3, 7, 9, 25, 26, 37, 40, 59, 60, 72, 117, 130, 131 Grocery stores, 41, 86, 87 H Health, 19, 23, 45, 48, 78, 87, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 106–108, 110–112, 115–117, 125, 126 Health benefits, 10 Health care, 7, 59, 96, 107–113, 115–117, 124, 125, 128, 145 Health crises, 21 Health emergencies, 20, 113, 116, 117, 125 Health limitations, 19 Health problems, 9 Health services, 7, 47, 95, 97, 108–111, 113, 114, 119

154

INDEX

Heteronormativity, 23 Hidden cost(s), 19, 44, 51, 54, 59–61, 73, 76, 78, 79, 82, 86, 103 Hidden emotional costs, 32 Hidden financial costs, 54, 59 Hidden relational costs, 73 Hidden social costs, 32, 54 Higher education, 2, 3, 18, 20, 22–24, 28, 35, 36, 50, 93, 100, 119, 124, 130, 132–134, 138, 143, 144 High-impact practices, 45, 105 Hmong, 3, 59, 101, 105, 107, 115, 136 Hmong history, 59 Homelessness, 19–21 Hospital, 44, 45, 51, 111–113, 117 Housing, 7, 8, 10, 22, 23, 47–49, 57, 59, 63–75, 77, 79, 83, 84, 86, 88, 92, 96, 124, 143, 145 Housing insecurity, 8, 22, 28, 71, 87, 125 Human well-being, 33 I iClickers, 53 Immigration, 23 Incarceration, 22 Incoming student fees, 38 Individual costs, 34, 91 Inequality(ies), 1, 2, 12, 21, 22, 44, 80, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 137, 145 Inequity(ies), 2–4, 6, 12, 23, 24, 32, 35, 43, 50, 63, 83, 96, 118, 124, 126, 127, 130, 138 In loco parentis , 65, 98 In-state tuition, 25, 36, 37 Institutional financial aid, 37 Instructional costs, 35 Instructional fee, 33, 46, 92

Inter-Library Loan (ILL), 50, 51 International, 133, 137, 138 International students, 38, 94 Internet, 18, 48, 70, 73 Internships, 40, 45, 54, 56, 109, 110

J Job market, 45, 46

K k-12, 117, 124 k-12 schools, 22, 125, 141

L Labor, 10, 21–23, 65, 74, 75, 124, 138 Labor market, 10, 126 Laptop, 40, 48–50 Laptop borrowing, 49 Late enrollment, 42 Late registration fees, 46 Latina student, 58 Latinx, 3, 59, 105 Leadership roles, 32, 40, 44 Learning community fees, 38, 67 Less-wealthy students, 19 Library(ies), 36, 41, 47–51, 53 Library materials, 50 Library policies, 50 Library services, 48 Living and learning communities, 40, 45 Living Expenses, 7, 11, 59, 64–66, 68, 69, 75 Living Learning Communities (LLC), 68, 69 Loan fees, 6 Loans, 7, 9, 25, 38, 40, 66, 117, 125, 126, 129, 131, 134, 144 Long-term cost of tuition, 43

INDEX

Low- and moderate-income, 4, 11, 24, 40 Low- and moderate-income students, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 17, 18, 24, 28, 32, 34, 38–41, 69, 72, 91–93, 95–97, 100, 101, 108, 110, 113, 116, 124, 128 Low Cost of Attendance (COA), 7 Lower class, 36, 92, 125 Lower middle-class family, 2, 22 Low-income students, 2, 3, 7, 9–12, 17, 19–21, 23, 24, 26, 31, 32, 37, 39, 41–45, 47–50, 52, 56–58, 61, 64, 68, 71, 77, 80, 84, 92, 97, 100, 105–107, 109, 110, 117, 118, 124–130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 142, 145 M Major(s), 7, 10, 20, 21, 32–34, 37, 38, 40, 42–46, 52, 56, 57, 78, 86, 110, 112, 117, 126, 128, 145 Majors market, 46 Male-ness, 23 Marginalization/Marginalize, 5, 21, 23, 32, 38, 57, 59, 63, 95, 101, 102, 104, 107, 118, 119, 125, 133, 135, 143, 145 Marginalized students, 13, 28, 97, 132–134, 140–144 Market-based management, 126 Marriage, 23 Meal plan(s), 9, 47, 76, 78–87 Meal point(s), 47, 64, 78, 80–83, 85 Media representations, 18, 64 Medicaid, 111 Medical, 8, 10, 98, 99, 108–112, 114, 116, 118, 125 Medical expense, 9 Medical fees, 44 Medical services, 22

155

Mental, 78, 98, 106, 107, 115 Mental health, 8, 22, 93, 98, 99, 104, 108, 109, 113–116, 118, 128 Merit aid, 37, 133 Merit-based aid, 3, 37, 129 Micro-aggressions, 58 Middle class, 3, 18, 22 Minimum wage, 10, 21 Minoritization, 5, 23 Minoritized students, 5, 12, 26, 43, 58, 59, 61, 96, 100, 101, 103–105, 115, 116, 118, 126, 128, 132, 133, 135, 140–142 Miscellaneous costs, 51 Moderate income, 26 Moderate-income students, 4, 109 Money, 3, 8–10, 31, 32, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 65, 73, 75, 76, 78–84, 86, 95, 96, 100, 103, 114, 118, 130, 133, 134, 144 Musical performances, 41 N Need-based Aid, 3, 37, 129, 143 Net price, 25, 26 Networking, 54, 75, 103 New managerialism model, 126 New public management, 126, 136 Nursing, 32, 33, 42–45, 56, 111 Nursing field, 44 Nursing major, 45 Nursing program, 44, 57 O Off-campus, 41, 48, 49, 63, 64, 66–68, 70–79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 97, 106, 109–113, 115–117 Official academic costs, 33 Official cost estimate(s), 66–69, 79, 86

156

INDEX

On-campus food, 79 On-campus housing, 63, 64, 67–72, 74, 77 On-campus living, 64, 86 Online, 44, 47–49, 51, 53, 57, 80 On-line courses, 31, 34, 42, 43, 47, 53, 131 Online supplementary materials, 42 Operating budget, 26 Out-of-state students, 5, 36, 38–42, 129, 132, 133 P Participatory Action Research (PAR), 135, 136 Pell, 130 Pell grant, 3, 25, 139 Perseverance, 23 Physical, 8, 12, 21, 22, 24, 35, 69, 77, 92, 96, 98, 99, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 141 Physical ability, 23 Physical damage, 21 Physical health, 78, 98, 114, 116 Physical well-being, 98 Policy(ies), 2–6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 22–24, 27, 28, 36, 38, 39, 41, 46–51, 64, 66, 68, 70, 78, 84, 88, 97, 109, 112, 119, 124–130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 145 Policymakers, 12, 42, 64, 135, 144 Political systems, 23 Poverty, 3, 4, 19, 97, 125 Precarious, 21, 116 Precarity, 74, 117, 126 Pre-college, 22 Pre-college experiences, 22 Prerequisites, 43 Price, 43, 44, 53, 54, 56, 66–68, 72, 75, 79, 80, 86 Printing, 53, 54

Printing budgets, 46, 54 Printing services, 48 Professional attire, 56 Professional clothing, 56 Professional development, 54, 102, 103 Professional groups, 54, 103 Public food security programs, 22 Public funding, 2, 13, 22, 66, 145 Public higher education, 2, 5, 12, 13, 17, 28, 34, 91, 124, 129, 135, 142, 144, 145 Public libraries, 22 Public-private partnership, 68 Public recreational services, 22 Public services, 21, 22, 117 Public support, 12, 22, 28, 117, 134, 143, 145 Public university, 2, 4, 5, 12, 28, 32, 34, 41, 48, 64, 68, 88, 91, 124, 127–129, 132–135, 139–142, 144, 145

Q Quality of life, 1

R Race, 2, 6, 22, 24, 32, 38, 42, 95, 100, 101, 107, 119, 124, 125, 127, 129, 143 Racial, 2, 5, 6, 12, 107, 116, 119, 126, 129 Racial inequity, 23 Racialized, 3, 35 Racially diverse, 23, 37 Racially minoritized, 18, 139, 144 Racism, 5, 32, 97, 102, 113 Racist, 58, 133 Recession, 22 Recreational services, 7

INDEX

Recreational sports, 48, 92, 95, 97, 107, 118 Recreation center(s), 95, 99, 105–107, 119 Recruitment, 36, 40 Reform, 37, 125, 132, 135, 137, 139, 142, 145 Relationships, 4, 21, 23, 32, 42, 65, 70, 73, 74, 76, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 112 Residence hall(s), 41, 69–71, 85, 88, 101, 102, 105, 106, 128, 133 Resources, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 20, 22, 23, 32, 36, 40–44, 48, 51, 56, 66, 72, 73, 87, 97, 99, 100, 108, 116, 117, 127, 133, 141, 145 Retention, 40, 99, 130 Reward system, 49 Rite of passage, 18, 21 Role model approach, 135 Role models, 139, 141 Rural students, 40 S Safe spaces, 104, 105 Salary, 7, 9, 21, 32, 130 Savings, 5, 7, 9, 19, 75, 76, 86, 102 School culture, 39 School loans, 21 Segregated fees, 41, 95, 108 Segregated history, 18 Segregated University Fees (SUF), 92–97, 99–102, 105–107, 118, 119 Segregation, 8, 12 Sexual assault, 8, 20, 21, 109, 115 Sexual identity, 2, 21, 95, 101, 107, 124 Social audit models, 137, 138 Social risks, 18, 64, 73 Social systems, 23 Social well-being, 98

157

Socio-academic experiences, 41 Socio-economic inequality, 2, 145 Socio-emotional, 32 State financial aid, 3 State funding, 5, 35, 36, 133 State funding and tuition, 34 STEM, 25, 26, 42, 43, 106, 128 STEM field(s), 33 Sticker price(s), 36, 37, 81, 133 Stop out/Stopped out, 7, 21, 25, 34, 58, 60, 70, 116 Student centers, 95–97, 99–102, 105, 128, 133 Student composition, 26, 38, 129 Student fee(s), 5, 11, 33, 92, 100 Student groups, 38 Student health, 94, 107 Student housing, 36, 73, 109, 118 Student loan(s), 3, 125 Student makeup, 38 Student organization(s), 8, 27, 32, 44, 92–96, 99, 100, 102–105, 115 Student recreation, 118 Students as consumers, 47, 69, 126 Students of color, 2, 19–21, 58, 59, 97, 104, 105, 117, 118, 133 Student success, 88, 133, 134, 140 Student unions, 36, 41, 93–95, 100, 118 Student well-being, 7, 95, 97, 119 Study abroad, 34, 40, 42, 45 Summer, 21, 24, 42, 54, 56, 71, 74, 86 Supplies, 51, 74, 99, 110, 111

T Taxes, 9, 22, 23, 73, 83, 119, 124, 145 Technology, 50, 53, 87 Technology rental services, 50

158

INDEX

Technology services, 48, 50 Tech policies, 48, 49 Textbook bundling, 52, 53 Textbook(s), 9, 42, 48, 50–53, 74, 94 Tiered tuition, 33 Transportation, 3, 22, 23, 45, 63–65, 72, 74–76, 86, 92, 95, 96, 124, 130, 145 True costs, 4, 23, 24, 31, 63, 64, 66, 67 Tuition, 3, 5, 10, 11, 18, 33–39, 41, 43–47, 49, 51, 57, 60, 66, 77, 92–94, 103, 109, 112, 114, 125, 129, 142, 143 Tuition freeze, 35, 38, 39, 93 2008 recession, 22 U Unanticipated costs, 7, 11, 111 Undocumented, 25 Undocumented immigrants, 58 Unexpected cost(s), 51, 59, 70, 71, 109, 110, 116, 118 Unexpected fee, 9, 42, 43, 60 University Health Services (UHS), 96, 99, 108–111, 113–118, 125 University of Wisconsin system (UWS), 3, 5, 6, 11, 25, 26, 33–36, 38, 39, 46, 50, 85, 93, 94, 144 University of Wisconsin (UW) System Board of Regents, 33, 119 University policy(ies), 64, 78, 80, 92, 118, 124–127 Upfront costs, 50, 56 Upper-class norms, 23 U.S. higher education, 18

V Values-Based Question(s), 132 Volunteered, 40 Volunteer opportunities, 41

W Wealth gap, 22 Wealth inequality(ies), 17, 20–22, 27, 97, 125, 134 Wealthy student(s), 5, 7, 10, 11, 37, 39–42, 47, 49, 56, 65, 74, 84, 92, 95, 97, 100, 101, 116–119, 126, 128–130, 133, 144 Welfare, 21, 117, 124 Welfare programs, 22 Well-being, 2, 4, 5, 11, 19, 23, 27, 39, 92, 94, 98, 99, 104, 108, 110, 112, 115, 117–119, 124–126, 132, 134, 139–141, 145 White-collar jobs, 19 White majority peers, 61 Whiteness, 5, 23 Wisconsin legislature, 133 Wisconsin residents, 5, 34, 35, 39 Women, 3, 8, 21, 23, 43, 104 Work, 4, 9, 10, 12, 19, 23, 24, 28, 32, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 57, 60, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77, 81, 82, 85, 95, 97, 99, 104–106, 110, 112, 113, 116, 124, 125, 127, 129–131, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142 Work hours, 7, 10, 54, 58, 59, 69, 85, 102, 106, 113, 116, 125