Columbia University — one of the richest US higher education institutions and among New York’s largest private landlords — is under growing pressure to tackle poverty, hunger and homelessness among its students.
Students and faculty are demanding greater help from the institution, which has an endowment of nearly $14bn and owns more than 200 buildings including a new $6bn Manhattanville campus.
Interviews with students and recent surveys suggest a significant proportion struggle to complete their studies in the face of rising costs and limited financial support, highlighting a growing problem among students across the US.
There are particular concerns about Columbia’s School of General Studies, established in 1947 for non-traditional students. With enrolment now at 3,000, the school has grown sharply in the past two decades and provides an important source of tuition revenue to the university.
The large number of these students and their level of financial need marks Columbia out from other elite universities. An analysis by its professors showed that 73 per cent of General Studies students were in financial need, compared with 62 per cent at Harvard and Princeton, 53 per cent at Yale and 49 per cent at Columbia’s own College and School of Engineering and Applied Science.
General Studies offers the Columbia undergraduate curriculum full- or part-time to mature applicants. Some are well off but 70 per cent need financial aid as they come from lower income backgrounds, including many who have transferred from community colleges, are military veterans or part-time workers.
Columbia does not provide the same financial safety net for those students, saying there are fewer donor funds earmarked for General Studies than for the much older core College.
General Studies markets itself as offering an elite college experience to diverse and lower income applicants, but it provides no specific financial aid calculator to help them estimate how their expenses will compare to the full-time undiscounted annual costs of $92,000.
Curtis Rodgers, vice-dean of General Studies, said 4 per cent of its students had been homeless at some point during their studies and up to 10 per cent were “really struggling”.
Columbia said it covered all “demonstrated financial need” among the typically better-off 6,800 undergraduates entering its College or school of engineering, but just 57 per cent of need among General Studies students. Its most recent data, for 2020-21, showed aid was 34 per cent of $99mn in tuition revenues for General Studies, compared with 47 per cent of $260mn for the College.
Charissa Kathleen Ratliff-D’Addario, who runs the Equality for GS campaign, said: “Columbia is a tuition-driven school. It takes advantage of already disadvantaged people, coaxing them and feeding off their desire to be educated with this Ivory Tower dream of traditional education.”
She said she was left with $150,000 in student debt after using all her savings and being forced to sell her house to cover tuition and living costs. “Students in GS feel like a doormat. They provide diversity but do not have the same standing.”
A recent complaint by another student who transferred into the General Studies programme last autumn described being charged a $1,000 penalty for moving out of official accommodation to save costs.
She wrote: “I cannot afford to attend your institution, and I cannot afford to leave. This is the epitome of financial predatory behaviour . . . The demographic you aim to attract is arguably the most marginalised and aid-dependent, yet full need is given to all other domestic undergraduate students in both Columbia College and SEAS [Engineering], a student demographic known to carry legacy admissions and come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds.”
Another current student described how after suffering domestic violence he was refused support or access to university housing and forced into homeless shelters in the city.
General Studies conducted its own student wellbeing survey early last year but has yet to publish the results. The last poll among all Columbia students in 2020 showed 10 per cent struggle frequently to pay for basic necessities, rising to 20 per cent among those who were Black and African American.
Two concerned General Studies students launched a university food bank in 2016. It has since supported more than 1,800 people with free provisions, and reported donations to more than 500 individuals in 2023 before the university took over the service and stopped publishing real-time data.
Michael Higgins, one of the founders, said: “The situation is dire across the university. I experienced food insecurity, and saw peers whose stories will never leave me on the decisions they had to make on whether to eat, sleep in the library or jump the [subway] turnstiles to get home.”
A group of 36 Columbia professors wrote an open letter in February last year to president Minouche Shafik, criticising how little of its endowment revenues it spent on financial aid compared with peers.
“General Studies markets itself aggressively to students at community colleges with the slogan ‘The Ivy League is within your reach!’,” they wrote. “We owe it to General Studies students to make good on these words.”
Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor and cosignatory who exposed how Columbia’s strong position in the US News college rankings was helped by the omission of General Studies students with lower graduation rates, said: “It’s very troubling to me that the school unmistakably has used General Studies as a source of revenue and to expand its diversity but offers them inferior financial aid.”
Vice-dean Rodgers stressed that General Studies raised an additional $15mn last year for financial aid.
“We are making every effort to more fully endow our financial aid but we can’t meet full need,” he said. “We think we can get there but it’s a decades-long process. We are 75 years old while Columbia was founded in 1754 and has a greater share of the endowment.”
Columbia’s 2022-23 accounts show that $4.5bn of its $13.6bn endowment was “without donor restrictions” — not earmarked for particular purposes — from which it extracted a $23mn appropriation for expenditure. The faculty open letter called on the university to use more of its endowment income to support General Studies students, arguing it provided less than 6 per cent to undergraduate financial aid when details were last made public.
A Columbia University spokesman said: “Columbia General Studies is committed to providing support for non-traditional students navigating their educational expenses. Although the endowment for General Studies is still quite small, the school directs significant funding across multiple sources to financial aid as a top priority. General Studies awarded nearly $37mn in financial aid to students for the 2022-2023 academic year, and continues to work towards increasing the amount of aid available.”
He added that Columbia’s Student Support Initiative aims to raise $1.4bn by 2025 for universitywide expanded access and affordability.
A survey last year by the National Association of College and University Business Officers showed on average 46 per cent of the spending from US university endowments across the country went to student financial aid.
A US government survey estimated in 2020 that 23 per cent of undergraduates and 12 per cent of graduate students across the US suffered from food insecurity, and 8 per cent and 5 per cent respectively experienced homelessness.
Megan Curran at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy said 18-24 year olds were often excluded from poverty reduction measures in the US, designed to target families and those who work. “You have seen poverty drop in meaningful ways since the 1960s for every population group except for young adults”.
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