Ask Slashdot: Hungry Students, How Common? 390
Gud (78635) points to this story in the Washington Post about students
having trouble with paying for both food and school. "I recall a number of these experiences from my time as grad student. I remember choosing between eating, living in bad neighborhoods, putting gas in the car, etc. Me and my fellow students still refer to ourselves as the 'starving grad students.' Today we laugh about these experiences because we all got good jobs that lifted us out of poverty, but not everyone is that fortunate. I wonder how many students are having hard time concentrating on their studies due to worrying where the next meal comes from. In the article I found the attitude of collage admins to the idea of meal plan point sharing, telling as how little they care about anything else but soak students & parents for fees and pester them later on with requests for donations. Last year I did the college tour for my first child, after reading the article, some of the comments I heard on that tour started making more sense. Like 'During exams you go to the dining hall in the morning, eat and study all day for one swipe' or 'One student is doing study on what happens when you live only on Ramen noodles!'
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
How common is 'food insecurity in college or high school'? What tricks can you share with current students?"
Cars are a luxury (Score:4, Informative)
A starving student with a car?! I think we've isolated the problem.
Re:Here's a trick: Don't live in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
As if food isn't going to be a problem in Europe, where the food and books and gas are far more expensive...
I was dirt poor as a student in college, but I still managed to eat just fine and have a car I could get away with when I needed a break. No way I could have afforded having and using a car in Europe.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Beans & Rice, Rice & Beans (Score:5, Informative)
It's like Dave Ramsey says: if you're broke, then eat "beans and rice, rice and beans." It's easy and cheap, even in a dorm.
1. Rice cookers are like $10-20. Get one with a steamer tray. It doesn't have a burner and can't start a fire, so tell your RA to fuck off.
2. Buy rice at the Asian store. It'll cost $1/lb for good Jasmine rice (brown rice only, you'll need the nutrients). (You don't have an Asian store? My ass. Or try the Mexican store. You don't have a Mexican store, either? Shut the fuck up and stop lying. Open your eyebulbs; they're everywhere.)
3. Buy bullion cubes and/or soup base (it comes in a jar) for flavor. You can get that stuff cheap at the Asian store.
4. Buy beans in a can from Save-a-Lot/Aldi/cheapo-store. I like navy beans and fava beans. There're a few dozen other kinds. Get what's cheap. One can a day, minimum.
5. Put the rice, soup base/bullion/soup mix and water in the rice cooker and press the button. Add the beans when it's done. Enjoy.
6. If you're feeling rich, chicken or sausage or burger patties go in the steamer tray.
7. The Asian store will also have cheap noodles that the rice cooker will cook just fine. Cheaper than ramen. (You still need the beans, or you'll eventually get something nasty like beri-beri.)
8. Oatmeal and raisins make a good, fast breakfast. (Add sugar packets and creamers from wherever other people get coffee.)
9. You'll also need to add some vitamin C every once in while to prevent scurvy. Any fruit or fruit juice will do. Tea made from fresh pine needles (actual pine trees only) will do in a pinch. I like raisins, apples, bananas, and oranges, which are all usually cheap enough.
You can actually live on that stuff for months at a time without dying. The soup base/bullion and occasional noodles and meat will keep you from committing suicide.
Re:Here's a trick: Don't live in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
Most universities in Germany include an unlimited public transport pass in the low semester fee (ca. $300 per semester, the biggest part of that actually is the public transport pass. There is no tuition.) Public transport includes railways, not just buses. You don't need a car. Cycling is common in Germany. Get a bike. It is often the fastest way to get around.
Students typically choose from several canteens offering a variety of subsidized meals (a full meal for $3.50, for example). You don't need to learn how to cook (but cooking is a great opportunity for socializing, so do it anyway).
Most required reading is available at the libraries or you can buy hand-me-downs cheaply. Course based learning materials are also made available online.
By far the biggest cost of studying in Europe is a place to stay. There's at-cost rooming (with high speed internet and other amenities), but due to the high demand there's usually a waiting list for that.
Re:Well considering that.. (Score:5, Informative)
Wealth is the integral of income (minus expenses). It's just how much of that income you're able to save or spend on durable or appreciating assets. A large percentage of lower- and middle-class income is spent on consumable necessities (food, clothing, gas, etc). But a lot (if not most) of it is also spent on things with no long-term value and depreciating assets with negative ROI (movie/concert tickets, iPhones, HDTVs, eating out, interest on credit card debt, the latest and greatest [anything], etc).
Given that income distribution is still pretty healthy, you can still amass a large amount of wealth if you simply live within your means and spend/invest your money wisely. I've met a little old lady who worked in a library all her life who has a half million dollar fortune, a carpenter who works out of a pickup truck who owns three houses. In my younger days I made about $40k/yr, yet over 5.5 years managed to save up over $100k for a down payment on a house. I had to live like a hermit, but it's doable. It's all about how you spend your money. If you're blowing it on things which will be worthless in a few years (or tomorrow) while blaming the 20% of people who own 95% of the wealth for all your woes, you've already lost. Yes the system can be improved, but "the man" holding you down is usually yourself.
Re:Here's a trick: Don't live in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
For everything except your education. And your job prospects...
Yeah, no one ever hires people from shitty European schools like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London, the Sorbonne, Gottingen, ETH Zurich, ...
Not expecting nor will get any sympathy. (Score:2, Informative)
I bet the only ones posting in here are going to champion how they made it, and how they, in fact, didn't starve, and how great they are.
College was the worst years of my life. All the stress and starvation just made me a very angry person. I still see that I am right, that there is literally no remorse or accommodation for someone trying to focus on studying and learning instead of "get a job you worthless piece of garbage".
These are the two options for those coming from very poor parents in a small town (and being white, ugly, male, and peasant clothing):
1) work menial service job and waste away.
2) work menial service job and go to college (and starve).
I am not trying to troll. I can just see the writing on the wall with no sympathy:
1) Why have __ when you should be eating food? You need to prioritize better. No sorry, need car to get to menial service job, remember?
2) Some bullcrap story from the 1990's or earlier that somehow supposed to be equivalent to the last 16 years of economic hell.
3) I made it by doing _ . You should follow this winning formula. Absent differences in city, luck, personality and circumstances.
4) All that starvation was good for you.
5) That you didn't make it was all your own fault.
6) Spoiled children... blah blah blah.
7) Some euro-centric view of the world that is only intended to bash the United States.
That the smart people on here won't come up with actual solutions (technological or otherwise) is not going to be surprising. Yes I made it, yes I graduated, but then it was a year without a job in the field. And all the stress and bad eating wrecked my digestive system. Also took a thin person and made him fat, with an affinity for gobbling up any extra calories and anything free.
Re:Ahh (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well considering that.. (Score:5, Informative)
We're far from that. Let's take a look at the Income equality by country [wikipedia.org].
Let's just take the richest/poorest 10% comparison. The US has a factor of 15.9. Meaning that the richest 10% make about 16 times what the poorest 10% make. With this, they're in the great company of splendid equality paradises like Uganda, Georgia (the country, not the state...) and Iran.
There is not a SINGLE European country with a worse ratio than the US. Granted, the aforementioned Georgia along with Portugal and the UK are coming close to it, but none of them is actually WORSE. Most central European (and let's also lump in the Scandinavian) countries revolve around a disparity factor of about 5-8.
That means that we're looking at about three times more equality in Europe than the US.
Btw, the 20% rich/poor ratio doesn't get much better for the US. It goes down to a "mere" 8.9 times more money in the 20% rich than the 20% poor, but it's still more than twice the ratio of Finland and Sweden.
A look at the Gini map [wikipedia.org] also tells a lot (ok, if you know what the Gini coefficient [wikipedia.org] is), with Europe lighting up in green and the US being in a group with such equal rights beacons like China, Argentina or Iran.
Re:Here's a trick: Don't live in the U.S. (Score:4, Informative)
The British are not really part of Europe...
re: degrees (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is, I'm hearing the exact opposite complaint coming from some of the people with many years of actual work experience in their fields. They're saying that recently, the college grads with a B.S. or Masters in the field are getting hired over those with real experience.
I don't know? Personally, I suspect the REAL issue is just a high unemployment rate overall. We're all stuck in a "buyer's market" when it comes to those doing the hiring, so expectations and requirements are very high, and opportunity to get hired is low. No matter where you're at on the education and/or skills ladder, it's difficult to get hired right now. So people begin tossing out accusations, trying to explain why they can't get jobs.
I've worked in I.T. for over 25 years myself, and yet I don't have a degree. (I'm one of those people with "some college", meaning a few classes shy of an Associates' degree.) I've *definitely* encountered my share of jobs I was passed over for because someone really considered the degree of prime importance. Yet I don't think my track record for employment is really any worse than my counterparts who did have the 4 year degrees. Yeah, some of them earned $20K - $50K/yr. more than I did, especially during the dot-com boom era.... but in the long-haul? A lot of them lost those high-paying jobs when budget cuts or corporate mergers came around and they had to accept less to get back into the ranks of the employed. Others just got burnt out on I.T. completely and changed careers.
Meanwhile, I don't have all the college debt they had to pay off, and since my salary has been relatively steady for the last decade or more, I didn't get so caught up in the thing of moving to a more expensive area, buying a large house, etc. -- only to have to give it all up when times got rough.
There's a key difference though between the "old guys" like myself and people trying to get a start in I.T. today. I think most of us who lived and breathed computers in the 80's really got into it when it was still a hobbyist's world. Corporate America wasn't even really looking at home computers as more than a passing fad, or something to just "keep an eye on, in case it eventually became useful". When you bought a computer ,you got a 200-300 page manual you had to read, cover to cover, to learn how to make it work. You might have shared knowledge with a few friends you made who owned the same machine, or joined some computer club in town. But all in all, you had to be really motivated to learn it, hands-on. Otherwise, why even waste time with it? My college courses in anything resembling I.T. were largely a joke. Either I knew way more than the professors did, or the courses went in depth on something I didn't know much about because truthfully, it DIDN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of I.T.
These days, I think colleges have figured out much more about what people actually need to know to be successful in I.T. -- and you actually *can* take classes and learn really useful material. At the same time, I see a lot of younger people who seem to be just as "into computers" as I was growing up, but they focus on much different things; social media, web sites, mobile device apps, and MMORPGs that can really suck up a LOT of one's time. It's all pretty cool and entertaining stuff -- but won't translate that well to a career doing network or systems administration, working as a PC support specialist, or systems analyst.
Re:C. H. Douglas -- Social Credit (Score:4, Informative)
>Copyright and patent laws exist to specifically prohibit "all of humanity" from inheriting anything
Quite the opposite actually, at least originally. Patents encouraged people to share their innovations with the world rather than keeping them secret (which was a major problem), in exchange for a decade or so of exclusive rights to profiting from them. Copyrights did similar - artists were encouraged to be more prolific by being granted control over the distribution of their creations for the first decade, giving them a better chance of being able to monetize their creations. And that addressed a very real concern - the for example it was quite common for the "media moguls" of Shakespeare's time to build their fortunes by producing performances of popular plays without paying the original playwright a dime - and thus many promising playwrights abandoned the profession in favor of something that would put food in their bellies. Or at least relegated their writing to an after-hours hobby.
The problem came when folks started gaming the system and then purchasing more lucrative extensions to the law. 10 years gives the creator time to make some money off the initial wave of popularity (assuming they can generate such). 100 years ensures that their grand-children can still prevent the work from entering the social inheritance, quite possibly contributing to the creation being lost forever.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)