Often, college students are accused of treating their lives on campus like a bubble; one that will pop after graduation when they have to enter the “real world.” That may be true, but plenty of students are facing incredibly challenging “real world” problems while still on campus. One of the most prevalent, and the least studied, is food insecurity.

A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education examined the students at Western Oregon University and found 59 percent of them were food insecure at least once during the previous year. Food insecurity by definition is, “the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.”

You may be asking yourself how that’s possible with meal plans, food courts, and snack carts dotting most college campuses. The reality is that many students aren’t getting enough healthy food because they struggle with high costs, limited income, and fewer food and social support systems.

The researchers feel the high number of food insecure students is caused by a combination of rising college costs, changing college student demographics, and more low-income and first-generation students attending college.

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On March 29, 2012, 200 students in Quebec went on strike to protest increases in tuition. The students gathered outside the largest courthouse in Montreal and blocked access to it during the early morning. Later in the day, the students had plans to march from four separate locations and meet in the downtown area of Quebec. These marches promised to cause traffic delays in the busy city and around 1:00pm, police used stun grenades and tear gas to get the rowdy students under control.

This is not the first time that student groups have gone on strike in Quebec due to proposed tuition hikes. There have already been several protests that caused the police to intervene and break up the protest; several dozen people have been arrested.

So these tuition hikes must be quite a large amount of money, right? The proposed increases will raise current tuition costs by 75 percent, making the yearly cost for attending college in Quebec $3,793 instead of the current $2,168.

Whoa, wait a second? Less than $5,000 to attend college for a year? That sounds fantastic to me! However, for around 130,000 students who have walked out of their classes, having a cheap and affordable education is a matter of principle.

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Everyone knows that the cost of attending college keeps rising and rising, but students at the University of Berkeley – a public school – are really starting to feel this trend.

The College Board recently announced that one year at Berkeley now costs more than $50,000 for students who do not qualify for in-state tuition rates. Berkeley is the first public school where students have to pay more than $50,000 a year to attend.

Berkeley isn’t the only school to recently increase the cost of attendance to more than $50,000. In 2008, there were only three schools in the country that charged this much, and soon there will be 100 schools in the country to hit the $50,000 mark in 2010-2011.

Tuition at Berkeley isn’t the only factor in this expensive equation: the College Board also included room and board, supplies, books, and “personal expenses” in this number. Tuition itself is somewhere about $35,000. Read the rest of this entry »