Believe in Students was founded in 2016, at the dawn of the first Trump administration. After years of changing higher education finances, the burden on students had become so great that studies regularly showed that more than half of all college students struggled with food, housing, transportation, health care, and other basic needs insecurity.
Many college students could not afford groceries or childcare or a small car repair so they could commute to campus. Some didn’t know where they would stay that night, some couldn’t afford internet access to do their homework. And in the wake of the pandemic, these challenges were exacerbated by the strains on mental health experienced by all Americans, college students or not.
As we gear up for a second Trump presidency, we recognize that we’ve been here before. So what did we learn? Actually, quite a lot.
Relatively small-dollar grants, offered at the right time and with maximum flexibility, could keep students in school or help them graduate.
We learned that when students are in the middle of a crisis, it’s hard to pay attention to outside messages, which means that even when services are provided, many do not know about the supports available to them . They don’t know where the food pantry is (if there is one) or how to request a recalculation of their financial aid. Car repairs? Missing child care? There’s often no support for non-academic needs. So when students don’t know where to go, they often talk to the only people they have access to every day: their professors.
We also learned—not just in our own studies, but from others—that relatively small-dollar grants, offered at the right time and with maximum flexibility for their use could keep students in school, or help them graduate. And that not only does this kind of support help students meet their financial needs, but it eases their anxiety, increases their feeling of belonging on campus, and builds stronger relationships between students and their teachers.
And about those teachers: we learned that campuses are full of people who care deeply about their students. Campus faculty, staff, and administrators found themselves under tremendous pressure—many of them dealing with the same financial, emotional, and health care challenges as their students. Yet they found time to restructure courses, find new connections, and in the case of our FAST Fund partners, pool their funds to help students in need.
Finally – we learned that these dollars, while vitally important to stabilize a situation, are not sufficient. Emergency grants stemmed the gap until housing relief, internet subsidies, expanded Medicaid, and child tax credits could lend longer-term relief. But even the billions of dollars the federal government dropped into emergency grants was not enough, without those deeper systemic investments to come alongside.
Drawing on what we learned during that time, we have leaned into our belief in students, our relationships with faculty, and all we now know from deploying millions of dollars to students on dozens of campuses across nearly a decade, to expand our focus to pursue the kinds of systemic change that we hope will make emergency grants just one tool of many that help students succeed.
Now, with another Trump administration looming on the horizon, we know that our work is more vital than ever. Statements from the incoming president and many in his administration paint higher education as an elitist, wealthy place, where coddled “kids” waste their time while out-of-touch professors indoctrinate them. This is a far cry from the reality, where almost half of all students attend community college and roughly 70% of faculty cobble together gigs at multiple institutions for a barely living wage because tenure is increasingly reserved for a privileged few. Those endowments the incoming administration is talking about taxing? The top 1% of institutions hold over half of the endowment dollars in the US, while a quarter of all institutions have endowments of $1M or less.
This is what our founder, Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab, dubbed “#RealCollege” – where we stop pretending that college is what we see in the movies and get real about the challenges faced every day by the students and faculty involved in teaching and learning. And so we have our mission: during the next term, we will lean into our work, continuing to help students close those gaps while seeking structural solutions. We will keep telling this story to the many people who don’t understand what #RealCollege is for the vast majority of Americans who still believe (rightly so) that higher education is the key to a stable life for themselves and their children.
The road in front of us is still one we gladly take: we will continue fighting to build a bridge between where students are and the degrees they’re pushing towards. We will continue acting when we see chances to affect institutional change. And we look forward to new partnerships and new opportunities for sustainable, lasting impact, with our students leading the way, because when they tell us what they need, we believe them. We hope you’re with us.