Increased Financial Aid Can Increase Demand for Basic Needs Services

In the fall of 2019, after years of declining enrollment, higher education institutions in New Mexico were seeking a new way to attract adult learners in the hopes of matching the state’s peak head count of around 154,000 postsecondary students, last achieved in 2010.

A year later, the state made great gains toward doing just that after establishing an expanded college promise program—the Opportunity Scholarship.

Unlike the state’s existing aid program, which was established in 1996 and provides free tuition for recent high school graduates, the opportunity grant has no age or income requirements, making it available to returning adults as well as undocumented immigrants. And it has led to a significant uptick in enrollment: Since fall 2022, the state’s total number of college students has grown by nearly 7 percent.

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A recent statewide survey shows that the boost in aid has increased accessibility for low-income students, who also tend to require more support services to ensure college doesn’t come at the cost of their basic needs.

The survey, funded by the Governor’s Food Initiative and the New Mexico Higher Education Department, was conducted in spring 2023 and covers more than 13,500 students, faculty and staff from all but two of the state’s 29 public institutions. It found that nearly 60 percent of students in New Mexico were experiencing food insecurity and 62 percent lacked secure housing.

While it’s impossible to draw a direct line of causation, Sarita Cargas, an associate professor of human rights at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the report, said it's entirely fair to note a correlation between increased aid and such high levels of insecurity.

“This study points to a real crisis,” she said. “Colleges are getting more students and they don’t have the resources to support them … It’s an equity issue.”

Addressing this gap should not only be a matter of moral concern for colleges, Cargas added, but a matter of sustainability in an era when student outcomes are increasingly important.

“There’s been a big push to get minorities in higher ed since the ’70s, and we’ve done a tremendous job bringing students of color and low-income students into higher ed,” she said. “But we haven’t done a tremendous job retaining them.”

It Takes a Village

Higher education department officials and university administrators from across the state have already formed a Basic Needs Consortium to develop a statewide response. While the group has yet to take any formal actions, members have been deeply engaged in brainstorming and have taken initial steps to recruit “help from all directions,” said Cargas, who is directing the consortium.

In an ideal world, Cargas said she hopes state policymakers would “step up to their responsibility for funding higher education” while university administrators would re-prioritize providing food and shelter over spending on other areas such as athletics programs, so that scholarships could cover the total cost of attendance, including basic needs.

But Todd DeKay, vice president of operations at Eastern New Mexico University, Roswell, a community college involved in the consortium, said that colleges “can’t provide everything for everyone.” While higher ed institutions should take the lead in ensuring that students’ basic needs are met, they can’t do it alone.

“It’s a shared responsibility,” he said, referencing the state, the church and other nonprofits as stakeholders that should be involved. “We have to come together on this at the table. I think we have a lot of resources out there and we’re competing sometimes instead of working towards the same [goal]. We need to coordinate our efforts better.”

The consortium is seeking to make that possible. Cargas said that data from the survey has already been shared with city councils in communities where colleges are based and presented in legislative committees to encourage lawmakers to consider students when proposing policies.

Institutions are also working to destigmatize and amplify outreach regarding underutilized, existing benefits, such as campus food pantries and emergency grants, as well as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that just 59 percent of food-insecure students who were potentially eligible for SNAP said they didn’t receive the benefits.

For now, easing access to existing benefits is a sound first step, but the consortium’s members agree there’s more work to be done in amending higher education and welfare policies, and funding the expansion of wraparound campus support services.

“This takes a constellation of policies, not one silver bullet,” Patricia Trujillo, deputy cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Higher Education Department, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We cannot merely appropriate our way out of these interconnected issues. Food and housing systems in higher education need new approaches that move them from the auxiliary of campuses to the center. We need new ideas. We need new structures. That’s why the NM Basic Needs Consortium is a critical part of this work.”

A National Model?

Multiple basic needs experts agreed, noting that although New Mexico’s survey and consortium aren’t the first of their kind, they are perhaps the most comprehensive.

Tanya Ang, executive director of the Today’s Students Coalition, a group of nonprofit student advocacy organizations, said that New Mexico’s data on students’ basic needs is “way more accurate” than much of the data that’s been collected previously, especially at the federal level.

Nationally, about 23 percent of undergraduates and 12 percent of graduate students experience food insecurity, according to a 2023 release from the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, and 8 percent and 5 percent of the same groups, respectively, experience homelessness.

Ang noted that the correlation between increased aid and the increased need for nonacademic student support is not exclusive to New Mexico. As other states expand their promise programs, she expects more low-income learners with a need for wrap-around support to enroll.

“I think what New Mexico did [by collecting data to better address the issues at hand] was phenomenal and I hope more states follow suit,” she said.

Mark Huelsman, director of policy and advocacy at The Hope Center at Temple University, a student equity research center, agreed. New Mexico has been on the leading edge of using data on student need to inform policy and institutional change, he said; nationally there is “a powerful opportunity” to pair free tuition with “robust” benefits programs that cover the costs of housing, food and childcare.

“We shouldn’t let any actor off the hook when it comes to solving this problem if it’s as dire as [New Mexico’s] survey data is telling us it is,” he said.

Ang said that when lawmakers, agency officials and administrators argue that providing such support is not financially feasible, her response is, “We can’t afford to not do it.”

She compared the new era of free college to the introduction of veteran education benefits after World War II.

“The GI Bill opened up opportunities for those that were not wealthy to pursue higher ed opportunities,” she said. “For every dollar that was spent on the GI Bill to help veterans get a post-secondary degree, seven dollars were returned back into our economy.”

Ang added that today, states are trying more broadly to introduce similar education access programs that offer a high return on investment, but ensuring they are rolled out successfully takes commitment.

“There’s going to have to be some give and take,” she said. “If we want students to be successful, then we need to make sure that we’re meeting their needs or helping them find ways to meet their needs so that they can finish their program of study and succeed in the workforce.”