A great take down by George Leef at the William Pope Center:
The authors acknowledge there is “limited information about the extent to which undergraduates struggle to find enough food to eat.” What information they have comes primarily from a survey administered to more than 4,000 students at ten community colleges in seven states. The results: “Half of all respondents were at least marginally food insecure over the past 30 days…. More than one in four respondents ate less than they felt they should, and 22 percent said that they had gone hungry due to lack of money.”
From that survey, the study concludes, “The most prevalent challenge facing community college students appears to be their ability to eat balanced meals, which research suggests may affect their cognitive functioning.”
One problem with this is that such surveys are not very accurate. People often give answers that they think are either what the researchers want to hear, or that might help themselves. From the survey responses we do not know that any of the students in the sample actually went hungry because they couldn’t afford food. We only know that quite a few said they were “food insecure.”
Photo by Walmart Corporate 
Photo by Walmart Corporate
