Things could get worse before they get better (starving student edition).

Times are tough all around these days. However, at schools like mine, a large public university with a population that includes a significant number of students who are older than traditional college age, are the first in their families to go to college, and/or were in economically precarious situations before the current economic crisis, the situation feels especially dire.

When I started teaching at San José State University in August of 2002, the U.S. had not yet gone to war in Iraq. By my third semester of teaching here, I was starting to lose students mid-semester because their Reserve units were being mobilized. Given the current economic crisis -- what it has done to families' savings, to home values, to credit markets, and to state budgets -- I'm guessing those slick military recruiting commercials that play up the "money for college" angle of enlisting are going to look better and better to a broader swath of students. The economic melt-down may do a lot to solve the problem the military has had in recent years of needing to lower standards to keep up with recruitment goals.

It makes me kind of angry that the college-bound young people who don't come from money are getting painted into this corner. The students I lost to war were really good students, smart and motivated. There just aren't too many good options to pay for college if you don't have money.

Our student population has always worked while in school, many students taking on full-time hours or more (although not necessarily from a single full-time job). As you might guess, balancing the demands of jobs with those of coursework can be pretty difficult (and this is before factoring in time for family obligations and commuting). With the job situation worsening, I expect more of our students to be working longer hours. Indeed, I've heard from my colleagues teaching this year that course enrollments are high but class attendance has plummeted -- either because students need to skip class to be at work, or because they need class time to sleep so they can meet the demands of the job.

Unfortunately, in lots of cases it's hard to learn enough to pass a course if you can't actually attend the course. This means that time-to-graduation for our students who are working more hours will likely increase.

Speaking of family obligations, I worry about the extra slack our students might have to pick up helping parents whose retirement savings shrank unexpectedly with the financial markets. If our past economic bumps are anything to go on, I'm also guessing that our students with small children may have a harder time finding daycare -- the smaller home-based daycare providers have an especially hard time when jobs dry up because some families will make the calculation that it makes more sense to have one parent stay at home to care for the kids rather than scramble to find another job to pay the care provider.

When you're a student, however, having a kid in tow can make it pretty hard to focus on what's going on in class. (And then there are the labs ...)

I have been aware that some of my students over the years have been homeless. Some have bounced between the couches of friends, others have camped out in common areas at school, and others have lived in their cars. I'm guessing, with the collapse of housing values and a good number of people still caught in mortgages that they couldn't afford, that some significant number of our students are going to face foreclosures (or that they may be renting from landlords facing foreclosures). If these students can find another housing option they can afford, chances are it will be much farther from campus (like the Central Valley or the greater Sacramento area). If they can't, we may have more of our students living in their cars.

I wish I knew a way that we could make our university more of a refuge from the horrors of the economy, a place where our students had the temporal, intellectual, and emotional space to immerse themselves in being students. But given the student population we serve, and how tightly connected our budget is to the California state budget (which is part of the current economic horror show), when things are bad out there, things are also bad in here. I don't think there's much we faculty can do to change the fact that serious learning requires time and effort. Nor is there much we can do to reduce the other obligations that make claim on our students' time and energy. All I can think to do is let these students know that we understand how hard things are for them, and fight like hell when people propose more cuts in education as a low-impact way to balance our budget.