A Common Misconception
Recently, one of our Neighborhood Coordinators received a note from a longtime supporter of the Georgetown Neighborhood Food Project. The note raised a fair question, one we suspect many people have wondered but never asked out loud:
If a university’s tuition is nearly $60,000 a year, do the students there really need food assistance? If a family has that kind of money to spend on a child’s schooling, don’t they have more than enough to cover food for their student?
It’s a reasonable thing to wonder. And it’s a misconception I understand completely — one that I myself held before I started doing this work.
Tuition Is Not the Whole Picture
The amount of tuition is a sticker-price number that tells you what a family could pay if nothing else were true. It doesn’t tell you who’s actually paying it, or what’s left over once they do.
A significant share of students are attending on scholarships or financial aid, which is support designed to cover tuition and sometimes little else. Financial aid packages are notorious for leaving almost nothing for room and board once tuition and course materials are accounted for. In other cases, a family stretches to cover tuition itself, and the rest — housing, food, everything else — becomes the student’s own responsibility. That’s a lot to ask of someone working a part-time job around a full course load.
The ‘starving college student’ joke isn’t always a joke.
Most of us have made a “starving college student” joke at some point — usually about ramen, or eating cereal for dinner. It’s easy to laugh at because it feels universal and harmless. But for some students, that joke describes their actual grocery budget, not a phase they’re exaggerating for effect. The humor makes it easy to overlook how real the underlying struggle can be.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Budgets For
Tuition is just one line item. There are always more living expenses to consider:
- Housing — on-campus and off-campus rates, which have climbed in recent years
- Meal plans — optional, and not always enough to cover three meals a day
- Transportation — many students don’t have a car on campus, which means getting to a grocery store isn’t as simple as it sounds. A trip that would take ten minutes by car can become a logistical challenge without one.
When you add these up, the real cost of being a student is far higher than the tuition number listed on a website.
Why We Partner with the Pantry at Southwestern University
Approximately 35% of Southwestern University undergraduate students are Pell Grant eligible,
representing more than 500 students with demonstrated financial need who may be at increased risk of experiencing food insecurity.
The USDA Six-Item Short Form of the Food Security Survey was administered both Spring 2024 and Spring 2026 to SU students, faculty, and staff (part and full time). During this time, the portion of ‘High Need’ students increased from 21% to 32%, while our First-generation students in ‘High Need’ increased from 26% to 46%.
The results of this survey also reported 71% of students experiencing ‘High Need’ have accessed the Pirate Pantry in the last 12 months.
Approximately 87% of the food and essential (non-food) items stocked in the pantry are distributed within five days, illustrating both the high demand and the critical role the pantry plays in supporting our students. A recent usage survey found that many students visit the pantry regularly, ranging from multiple times per month to weekly.
Students also reported that without access to the Pirate Pantry, they would be more likely to skip meals, purchase less nutritious food, or seek other forms of food assistance.
A Familiar Pattern
There’s a useful comparison here: think about retirees living on Social Security or another fixed income, who have to cover all of their living expenses out of that one amount. When the math doesn’t quite work, something has to give.
Across every age group we’ve seen this pattern hold true: food is often the first thing people cut back on when money gets tight. It’s flexible in a way rent and tuition aren’t — you can’t skip a housing payment, but you can skip a meal. That’s exactly why food assistance matters, even in communities that look financially secure from the outside.
Where the Food Goes
We want to be transparent about this because our donors deserve to know: food donated to the Georgetown Neighborhood Food Project supports the Georgetown-serving pantries who provide for our neighbors who are facing food insecurity, including college students who are working hard, studying hard, and still coming up short at the grocery store by the end of the month. It also includes families and individuals throughout our community who need support for all kinds of reasons.
Need doesn’t always look like what we expect it to look like. We’re grateful to donors who give with open hearts, and we hope this helps explain why student need is real need — and why your donations matter to more people than a tuition number might suggest.
Thank you for continuing to support our neighbors. If you have questions about who we serve or how donations are used, we’d love to talk with you.