In the midst of all of the academics, prestigious faculty and mysterious societies surrounding Ivy League schools, people seldom think about simple day-to-day student life.
Say, what are these students having for lunch?
Or, an even easier question: are they having lunch?
Students at Columbia University in New York have recently brought more attention to the issue of food insecurity on their campus.
Some low-income students can’t afford the basic meal swipes from the school and have relied on veritable life hacks to create their meals. One student said she even made “milkshakes” out of the free milk and syrup the dining halls provide.
Two Columbia students unveiled a smartphone app this year to combat this problem. It’s called Swipes and it matches up students with extra meal swipes — the Swipers — with students in their campus vicinity who need a meal — the Receivers.
The Swipers can then meet up and swipe the Receivers into a dining hall, allowing them to have food that day.
The app is kind of like Tinder, except neither party has to suffer through a bad date just to get a bite to eat.
Swipes was well received by students of all income levels. Those who feel they’re wasting their unused meal swipes when they expire each week no longer have to feel pressured to take full advantage of them or lavish if they don’t.
And those students who cannot afford enough meal swipes find solace in the app after discovering they are not alone in the food insecurity struggle.
Though all this camaraderie and problem solving is respectable, we cannot help but wonder why the food security difficulties got so out of control that the students felt they had to step in.
Why doesn’t the university take on this issue, in all its donation-laden beauty?
It is no secret Columbia receives a plethora of donations each year from wealthy supporters and alumni. For the university’s most recent campaign, Illuminating Our Future, Columbia raised a whopping $6.1 billion, making it the largest sum of donations for any Ivy League college campaign, according to the campaign’s website.
The university also rakes in a fair amount of funds from its estimated cost of attendance of $69,084 a year for undergrads.
This money goes toward new buildings, more housing, hefty salaries for deans and administrators and large research grants for the school. Colombia has the highest-paid professor in the United States, according to thebestschools.org, and Business Insider ranked Colombia’s president as the highest-paid president of the Ivys in 2014.
It certainly isn’t unreasonable to expect a bit more financial support for the students Columbia University has already admitted to the school, especially if those students are starving and depending on the graces of their peers for food.
What might be in order is a food scholarship or at least a broader school-wide solution to food insecurity. After all, not every student has a smartphone and even if they did, they are not required to sign up for the app.
So to the group of kids at Columbia who sought a solution to the problem — thank you. Way to look out for your classmates and share your skills in an innovative, salient way.
But for the administration of the school, we expect more. Notice what is going on with your students now instead of worrying about how to further capitalize on them in the future.
