Most New Mexico college students struggle with unstable housing and limited food

People cross Central Avenue, which borders the University of New Mexico's Albuquerque campus, on Aug. 27. (Photo by Bella Davis / New Mexico In Depth)

Nicole Pelt is on track to be the first person in her family to graduate college.

The 20-year-old Diné student is in her senior year at the University of New Mexico’s Albuquerque campus. She chose Native American Studies as a major because she wanted to learn about potential solutions to the impacts of colonization, like a widespread lack of clean, running water on the Navajo Nation.

“It means everything to me to get a degree,” Pelt said, adding that her mom enrolled in college but didn’t graduate because caring for Pelt and her sister and attending classes and studying became unmanageable. “Everything I do here at UNM, it’s not just for me. It’s also for my family.”

Her plan is to become a teacher, possibly at a local tribal school, and earn a master’s degree, most likely in Indigenous education.

But she almost didn’t make it.

During her first year at the university, Pelt became homeless.

“I bought a sleeping bag and I would roll it up and take it from one friend’s dorm to the other, just lay it out on the floor,” Pelt said. “I would stay until I felt like they were getting sick of me.”

She is one of thousands of college students in New Mexico who have struggled with unstable housing or limited access to food.

Last year, researchers with the UNM Basic Needs Project , in partnership with the state Higher Education Department, surveyed nearly 10,000 students, along with 4,000 faculty and staff, at 27 higher education institutions in the state.

They found stable housing and getting enough food, especially nutritious food, were challenges for more than half of students within the prior year, a rate that far exceeds national averages. And Native American and Black students — who, at UNM, graduate at lower rates than other students — struggle more than their peers to meet those basic needs.

Lack of food and a stable place to live, the survey found, is connected to poor academic and life outcomes. That includes lower grade point averages, a higher likelihood of dropping classes, and a greater prevalence of symptoms of depression and anxiety.

“When we did the survey, I do think as researchers we went in knowing that we were going to see some pretty stark numbers,” said Higher Education Deputy Secretary Patricia Trujillo. “But when you actually see those percentages, it’s pretty difficult data to look at.”

Many students who responded reported receiving federal or state scholarships, but those often don’t cover all academic and living expenses — not only food and housing but also transportation, health care and, sometimes, child care.

Sarita Cargas is the lead researcher and director of the newly-formed New Mexico Basic Needs Consortium. She’s also an associate professor in the UNM Honors College focused on human rights, and that’s guided her work in this area.

Before the project started, Cargas said she hadn’t heard the phrase “basic needs” but “thought in terms of human rights.”

Food and housing, she pointed out, are considered rights inherent to every person in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

A response she sometimes gets to the survey’s findings is that it’s normal to struggle financially while in college, Cargas said.

“It is often one of the poorer times in someone’s life, and in my generation, that was true,” she said. “It was true of me. I was a Pell Grant student. But the difference is that things are getting worse.”

When Cargas was in college, the Pell Grant — a federal program that’s awarded grants to students with financial need since 1973 — covered 80% of costs, including tuition and housing. Now, it covers less than 30% .

Cargas hopes state lawmakers will pursue solutions including grants to students living through emergencies.

A difficult start

Pelt grew up in Albuquerque before spending high school in southern Texas. She doesn’t remember her parents talking much about higher education.

“I think they were too scared to encourage me because they knew at some point they would have to pay for something and at that point in time we were barely making rent, let alone sending me off to New Mexico,” Pelt said during a July interview.

But in 2021, she got accepted to UNM and was able to attend through a nursing scholarship.

For her first few months in town, she lived with a friend. That arrangement fell through about halfway into her first semester, and she spent the next two months bouncing between three friends’ dorms.

Balancing school and work at the Frontier Restaurant while figuring out where to sleep every night was exhausting.

Her grades slipped.

“I stopped caring about going to classes because I was more worried about where my next meal was going to be or when my next shift was, how much my next check would be, my sleeping arrangements,” she said.

She told her academic advisor in the nursing program — she changed her major prior to her sophomore year — that she had become homeless. The advisor told her she couldn’t help her, Pelt said, and didn’t offer any suggestions.

Eventually, she found her way to American Indian Student Services, a resource center on campus. An advisor there helped her get a dorm of her own and a work study job at the center.

Without that support, she said, she’s not sure she would’ve stayed at the university.

Above the national average

Nationally, 23% of undergraduate and 12% of graduate students are experiencing food insecurity, meaning they’re not getting enough nutritious food or are skipping meals and going hungry. And 8% of undergraduate and 5% of graduate students are experiencing homelessness. That’s according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Education data by the Hope Center for Basic Student Needs at Temple University.

But in New Mexico, those rates are much higher.

The UNM Basic Needs Project surveyed 9,995 students, 92% of whom were undergraduates, in spring 2023.

Researchers found 58% of students in New Mexico had experienced food insecurity in the past year. Additionally, 62% had experienced housing insecurity, which can range from not having a roof over your head to leaving a household for safety reasons or not paying the full amount of a gas or electric bill.

Even with New Mexico’s high rates overall, Native American and Black students are at a greater disadvantage.

Researchers found 70% of Native American and 68% of Black students in New Mexico had been food insecure and 69% and 76%, respectively, had been housing insecure.

Those racial disparities compelled Cargas to “keep looking back for causes.”

Cargas pointed to a long history of government policies that dispossessed Native Americans of their lands and racist practices like redlining and restrictive covenants that didn’t allow Black people and other people of color to buy or occupy land. That’s prevented many families from building generational wealth through land and home ownership.

“All of these things catch up with a college student who doesn’t have the family wealth to pay for higher ed,” Cargas said.

Looking at individual schools, rates of unstable access to food and housing are highest among students at tribal colleges.

Most notably, 90% of students at Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint had experienced basic needs insecurity, followed by Diné College (83%), which is based in Arizona but has campuses in New Mexico, and the Institute of American Indian Arts (82%) in Santa Fe.

Balancing act

The majority of students surveyed were either employed (62.8%) or seeking employment (17.7%).

Students quoted in the report on the survey’s findings said they’ve considered dropping out of school to get second jobs, been distracted in class by stress and hunger, and skipped class to pick up extra shifts.

New Mexico In Depth heard from several Indigenous students attending UNM’s main campus about the difficulty of working while in school. The news organization hosted two group discussions on campus this spring to learn more about barriers to higher education for Indigenous people.

Crucita Cate, from Kewa Pueblo, about 40 minutes north of Albuquerque, is studying biochemistry and hopes to go to medical school. As of last semester, she was working 20 hours a week as a research assistant at the university’s Health Sciences Center.

“It’s kind of like, just getting through one semester trying to figure out how to pay and then going on to another semester,” Cate said during one of the discussions. “Working just to make sure I have something to eat while I’m here, it’s been a lot on me.”

The estimated cost of on-campus housing and a meal plan for the last academic year was $11,884, according to the university. Other costs, including books and transportation, were estimated at $6,368.

Nautisha Keeto, Diné, is a business major in her senior year.

Her parents had a hard time providing for her and her sister, she said, and that’s made focusing on school a challenge. As a teenager, she found herself thinking often about “home and how stressed out my mom was and how I could help.”

But her parents “always instilled” in her how important they think education is.

This spring, she was working 35 hours a week mentoring and tutoring high school students while enrolled in five courses.

“Just the amount of hours that I have to work and then having to attend class and do homework, it’s a lot to handle all at once,” Keeto said.

One thing that’s kept her going is a longstanding dream of being the first person in her family to get a college degree. Her parents dropped out of high school when they had her, Keeto said, and her maternal and paternal grandparents went through similar situations.

“I wanted to break that cycle, go to college and I am very happy that I did,” Keeto said. “It was a struggle to get where I am.”

‘Lots of opportunity’

Since 2021, the state Higher Education Department has dedicated over $2 million to increasing access to nutritious food on college campuses, benefiting an estimated 15,000 students, according to a department news release .

Most recently, the department awarded $1 million to eight higher education institutions for such initiatives.

The Basic Needs Project got $45,000. Navajo Technical University received $125,000 for a project that will “integrate cultural practices and traditional knowledge about agriculture and wild plant identification, plant a raised garden, provide cooking demonstrations and develop a cookbook.”

Several institutions proposed projects that aim to partner with local farmers to give students fresh produce.

“People are getting very creative,” said Trujillo, the deputy secretary. “We want to move away from just emergency pantries to how do we actually change the structure of this institution so that food security is just part and parcel of the experience there.”

The state’s work to address housing access among students, though, is “more nascent” than its efforts around food, Trujillo said. The department and its partners, she said, are visiting higher education institutions around the state to learn more about their students’ particular housing needs.

One concern Trujillo hears often is where the money will come from to support students in affording all the costs that come with college.

“We know the state can’t pay for that all,” Trujillo said, and that’s where other funding sources, like federal grants and philanthropy, come in.

Looking ahead to next year’s 60-day legislative session, which starts in January, there are a couple proposals Cargas hopes state lawmakers will consider.

One of those recommendations is funding basic needs offices on every college campus. Office staff could, for example, do more targeted outreach to help destigmatize seeking food or housing assistance.

“Students suffer in silence, and they think they’re alone,” Cargas said. “That’s something we could change with outreach and education, is to teach students you’re not alone, and it’s not your family’s fault.”

Staff could also work to expand on-campus food pantry hours, or create pantries on campuses that don’t already have one. Some colleges in the state don’t offer anywhere to go for food, so students resort to nearby gas stations, Cargas said.

Another recommendation is grants for students experiencing emergencies that affect their ability to attend classes, like unexpectedly losing their housing or having their car break down. For some students, Cargas said, having that help could be the difference between staying in school or dropping out.

Schools in states including Washington and Minnesota have established similar emergency grant programs. Some have created systems to get money out to students within 24 hours, according to Cargas.

“We have lots of opportunity, and we can do a lot right here in New Mexico to solve this,” Cargas said.

New Mexico In Depth met Nicole Pelt and learned about her story while employing her part-time through the University of New Mexico work study program, which paid the majority of her salary. She was employed through that program during the 2023 academic year and no longer works for New Mexico In Depth.