The Unseen Faces of Hunger on College Campuses

September is Hunger Action Month. But the hunger I've spent this summer thinking about doesn't look the way most people picture it. It's not a food pantry line or a soup kitchen. It's a lecture hall.

Think about the student who showed up to class this week — found a seat, opened a laptop, looked like everyone else. They didn't share with anyone that tuition had taken the money they'd set aside for groceries, or that they've been rationing whatever's left in their mini-fridge since Tuesday. Among peers and in the classroom, hunger feels like something to be embarrassed about — not something to say out loud.

I'm Vedant Mehta, a rising sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill. This summer, through the Carolina Center for Public Service and their APPLES Service-Learning Program, I spent time working with PORCH Communities — meeting with food pantry managers at college campuses across the country. Nineteen pantries. Seven states. Large public universities, historically Black colleges, commuter campuses, community colleges serving working adults. What I kept coming back to — in every single conversation — is just how many students are hungry.

The numbers are hard to sit with. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that roughly 3.8 million undergraduates — about one in four — experienced food insecurity. That's more than double the rate in the general population. On individual campuses it runs even higher: 59 percent of students at Georgia State reported food insecurity. Fifty-two percent at Kennesaw State. And these aren't students who sometimes worry about food — most face severe need: regularly skipping meals, eating less because there simply isn't money for more.

The need hasn't gone unnoticed. More than 700 campus food pantries now operate nationwide, and most opened in the last decade. They represent real commitment by schools that saw the need and decided to do something. But pantries can only help the students who use them — and most food-insecure students don't. Not because they don't need to, but because they didn't know the pantry was there, or worried about being seen, or told themselves someone else needed it more.

Recent federal policy changes have made all of this harder. The 2025 budget legislation enacted the largest cuts to SNAP in the program's history — an estimated $187 billion. College students were already largely locked out of federal nutrition benefits; most full-time students don't qualify for SNAP under existing rules. When the safety net pulls back, the shortfall doesn't vanish. It lands on the pantry shelf.

Here's what no one talks about enough: the food is actually there. Donations come in. Drives get organized. People want to help. The problem I heard again and again, from pantry after pantry, is that the food arrives at the wrong time.

Every campus pantry runs on two calendars at once — when the food comes in, and when students need it most. On most residential campuses, those two calendars work against each other, and the people running these pantries are the first to tell you.

The University of South Carolina described it plainly: its biggest donation pushes come in August, driven by move-in energy, and around the winter holidays, when end-of-semester goodwill peaks. But demand spikes when tuition is due — in August and again in January — and stays high through the summer, when meal plans have lapsed, campus jobs have dried up, and donations have stopped. The problem isn't that giving and need never overlap; it's that giving doesn't sustain itself when need does.

Belmont University described the same mismatch. Its single biggest food drive is tied to spring move-out; its holiday drive runs in December. Both are moments when the fewest students are on campus. The pantry's shelves are the fullest exactly when its students have gone home.

Georgia State's Panther's Pantry numbers say it plainly: a 43 percent increase in visits with almost the exact same number of people. The need isn't spreading to more people — it's deepening in the ones already there.

At community and commuter colleges, the picture looks different — and in some ways starker. Laney College in Oakland serves around 400 unique students across just two distribution days a week, and the demand barely fluctuates. As the pantry operator put it: "As long as we have it, they're gonna come." San Jose State keeps its pantry open five days a week, serving a couple hundred students a day. There's no December surplus and no summer lull — just a constant, high floor of need that never lets up.

Every pantry manager I spoke with is doing their best to bridge that gap. But drives and events can only go so far. What these pantries really need — and what few have been able to build alone — is a way to get food in the door consistently, month after month, on a schedule that doesn't dry up when the campus empties out.

PORCH doesn't run on drives. It runs on neighbors helping neighbors, and on consistency. Each month, neighbors donate bags of nonperishable food, Neighborhood Coordinators collect those donations, and deliver them to local pantries or community centers — month after month, whether it's August or January or the middle of a quiet June. Consistent food that shows up every month, regardless of what time of year it is.

The pantry manager can't fill those shelves alone. But a neighbor can. Someone who lives in the community can become the reason a student gets through the week without skipping a meal.

These students are out there — in classrooms near you, going hungry in plain sight. One coordinator. A few neighbors. A bag of food left on a porch once a month. That's what it takes to make sure they don't have to choose between books and dinner.

Interested in starting a PORCH in your community?