Break the Silence!

Good morning NASPA13 and #SAchat colleagues!

I work with students experiencing hunger, homelessness, food insecurity, and poverty. I love what I do because I enable low-income students in their ability to stay in school. You can check out my office at www.oregonstate.edu/hsrc

I wanted to share briefly my own story of situational poverty. I took a break from Student Affairs after completing my MA in Educational Leadership at Washington State University (Go Cougs!). I went to work at a wilderness therapy program for troubled teens. I enjoyed the work, and did it for several years, and even was promoted to the Field Director Team.

We were encouraged to take leaves of absence in the winter time because numbers went down. I took 3 months off to go to New Zealand, and while I was gone our corporate owner asked the question "if this person is taking this much time off, is she needed at all?" My position was eliminated just before I returned stateside. The program did not have any other positions for me until the summer, and because I had been on vacation I had used a lot of my savings.

I never imagined I would be unemployed.

I had been thinking about going back to Student Affairs for a couple of years, so I decided to start a job search. While I was doing that, I worked at a couple of nonprofit organizations in Moab, UT. I made very little money, and rent was hard to make every month. I was losing money before I even bought groceries.

I decided that the best move I could make financially was to move out of my place. I was in a relationship at the time, and we borrowed his parents' RV. A month or so later we broke up, and I moved into my car full time. I couch surfed, camped, and freelanced at the area wilderness programs. Eventually I went home to NY to stay a while with family.

All the while I was applying for jobs in Higher Ed. I interviewed over and over and over, but the market was tough, and I had been out of the field for a while. My friend sent me the PD for the position at Oregon State - Human Services Resource Center Coordinator - the position I now hold. I never imagined that having applied for food stamps or living in a car would be helpful to me in an interview! I started working at OSU in January 2011 - about one year from the time I lost my job.

I feel like I was the luckiest homeless person in the world. I might have been in situational poverty, but I had a nice car to live in, good credit, and a Masters degree. I KNEW I would be OK - just not when. I had the privilege of looking like someone who "belonged," and who could do things like network and interview within the dominant culture. I had a resume that would get my foot in the door, and I could write a mean cover letter. I had a family who could take me in. I had a best friend in my dog, who lived with me in the car.

We need to remember that anyone can be homeless, anyone can experience poverty, anyone can have a life shock. We also need to remember that our students can be experiencing poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Class and SES are not often talked about in our diversity and social justice dialogues. That needs to change. Poverty is cross-cutting, critical, and pervasive.

If you have interest, please email me at clare.cady@oregonstate.edu to learn more, and to join a mailing list for a new NASPA KC I want to start.

In service to students...

Looking for a 360 View on Tuition Increases

I imagine that mine is not the only campus in the country where students and administrators are embroiled in a battle over tuition. Our student government did what I would say is a beautiful job of organizing this year to make it clear that they wanted a tuition freeze, including websites, public demonstrations, and letters to the President. I felt proud of their efforts...and I knew that they would not get what they wanted.

Really they should not (they would kill me if they read this - if that is your knee-jerk reaction please bear with me). In an eloquent letter to our community the Provost and Executive Vice President explained the tuition increase, discussing it in a near-360 manner (I will share what I mean by that in a moment). The letter talked about the political climate, the economic climate, the decrease in state funding, and the monies raised for scholarships to help students attend. The most salient part of the letter for me was the concept that the revenue gleaned from a tuition increase can be linked to helping students graduate faster.

If that is true (and I can't know if it is standing here in this moment), then I can understand it fully. If the increase is, for instance $150 per term, and a student has one more year, then the most they will pay extra would be $600. This is WAY below the cost of another year - IF the money from the tuition is used to increase course offerings, hiring more instructors, improving infrastructure, and the myriad of other factors that can lead to a student graduating more quickly. Students graduating faster? Hey, if we can pull that off, I am OK with the increase.

Some of the students in my office did not really see this logic. For them spending more money now = BAD, and the idea of spending less over time did not cross their minds. Of course, my office serves the approximate 10% of our campus population who are experiencing poverty, hunger, homelessness, food insecurity...and several of my staff members are right there in the boat with the students we serve. When we talked about it further I reminded them that there were a great number of students on our campus who would not bat an eye at the increase in tuition, or for whom this would be an annoyance, but could easily shoulder the cost. The reality is that on all college campuses there are people who can cover these costs - they just end up falling through the cracks in these conversations because they are not the focal point of economic hardship. On some campuses this is a high percentage, on others - public schools, land-grant institutions, community colleges - it is much lower.

My students were initially upset to hear me talk about tuition increases in this way. Why was I not with them!?!?!?! Why was I talking about the students who could afford this injustice?!?! Where was their social justice minded supervisor who championed the cause of the truly poor college student?!?!

Here is where my statement about the Provost's message not being fully 360 comes into play. The thing is, the Provost is right, AND the students are right. The trouble, in my opinion, is that neither is giving it a full look (and, I imagine I have my own blind spot in this as well). What was missing from the equation is that the students who use the services in my office may not benefit from the measures put forward by increasing course offerings, hiring more instructors, and improving infrastructure. That is because these are tactics well in line with mainstream approaches to higher education. The students I serve - mostly first-generation, coming from working or generational poverty, are not as equipped to benefit from the current way of doing business. They are more likely to take longer to graduate BECAUSE the system is not set up for them. Increases in the status quo may not provide them the same outcome as other students.

So what to do? Here is where I drive home the importance of three things:

• Support programs focused on low-income, first generation, and other underrepresented populations. These programs need to grow in direct proportion to the increase in classes, instructors, and infrastructure - and if that means an increase that is higher in proportion to the number of students who need these services...all the better. Take the additional resources and put them toward training your new instructors and staff on ways to serve these students, and infuse an understanding of class, SES, and social capital into the curriculum.
• Increased need-based aid. I don't just mean financial aid. I mean scholarships, grants, subsidies, stipends, free or subsidized housing, and other ways to lower the cost for students who are most affected by tuition increases.
• Safety-net services for students. Either find a way to effectively link your students into services in your community, create a services office on your campus (call me if you want to learn about the one I run), or do some kind of hybrid between the two.

That is what was missing from the Provost's view of the situation - and the rest of his view was what was missing from the eyes of my students. There needs to be an understanding that tuition increases CAN be beneficial, when paired with supports to the students whom will be hurt the most.

Does this mean that I don't advocate for decreasing the cost of college? No. I am also putting my mind to that complex issue. But, in the meantime, I think that working on these things could continue to create access for students I see every day who are literally starving for knowledge.

Convergent Student Needs

It's been a while since I posted. I wanted to share this Venn diagram we created to demonstrate the overlapping needs of student-parents, student veterans, and students experiencing poverty. My colleagues, Gus, Amy, and I are presenting on our work to address both the unique and overlapping needs at the 2013 NASPA National Conference.

If this diagram piques your interest shoot me an email! clare.cady@oregonstate.edu