Hungry to Learn

 

Yahoo Life partnered with Emmy and Peabody Award broadcaster Soledad O'Brien to exclusively present the documentary Hungry to Learn.

You can watch it at yahoo.com

O'Brien and her team followed four college students facing the hard choice of paying for college or paying for food and housing. She discovered that an astounding 45 percent of college students are struggling with hunger. The hunger crisis escalated this fall semester as some campuses opened online because of COVID-19, leaving financially struggling students with no place to live or eat.

Ever since the pandemic began closing down most American colleges, the rate of food insecurity among students has been rising — and it’s about to get much worse. No classes all spring meant no dorms to provide housing for students who didn’t have a home to return to. It also meant no food service. Some of the more than 650 food pantries on campuses also shut down or scaled back. This fall, fewer than 25 percent of the nation’s 5,000 colleges had planned to reopen their campus for in-person school, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which means that many of the remaining 75 percent are not offering dorms or food yet again. It also means that jobs on or near campus are scarce.