ABOUT THE BOOK
How exceptional low-income students navigate and pursue opportunity in prestige-oriented universities, at the personal cost of hunger
Beneath the veneer of prestige and promise, a hidden issue pervades the campuses of America's selective universities. In Starving the Dream, Nathan F. Alleman, Cara Cliburn Allen, and Sarah E. Madsen reveal the startling contradiction between the celebrated opportunities of these prestige-oriented institutions and the food insecurity that exceptional low-income students must navigate within environments of plenty.
​
This expansive study challenges readers to reconsider the broader impacts of higher education's structures and priorities and urges a reevaluation of what full participation should look like in these resource- and opportunity-rich environments. Starving the Dream is an appeal to university leaders, campus administrators, and students themselves concerned with educational equity beyond mere access. It provides a blueprint for meaningful change that centers the knowledge of those experiencing and administrating food insecurity, such that the dreams of selective university attendance need not be deferred by student hunger.
Book Sections
PART ONE:
The Dream
“The Dream,” embeds the reader in our campuses by narrating the official campus admissions tours and the student participant-led “alternative” campus tours. These tours are used to expose the layered institutional self-projection and expectation-setting of prestige-seeking as it takes form in the physical, social, and organizational environment. The official campus tour is contrasted with the alternative campus tour where students who struggled to afford food were the guides narrating their experiences with food and food insecurity, describing their approaches to navigating a campus environment of choice and opportunity.
PART TWO:
Administrating the Dream
“Administrating the Dream,” details the Good Administrator and their attempts to manage student hunger and administer support to students who regularly struggle with basic needs. Following a brief telling of the history of administrating food in higher education and its gradual connection to university prestige, we investigate the implicit dual professional “logics” of efficiency and care, and the ways that they coalesce in and with an environment of competitive status. We show how, despite many administrators’ own empathy and personal experiences of marginalization, the very elements that make these universities players in the arena of prestige-oriented higher education sometimes constrain administrators’ imagination for responses. Consequently, their food aid strategies adopt practices developed in very different college settings, such as regional state universities and community colleges, and those that fit preferred organizational modes shaped by expectations of student affluence.
PART THREE:
Navigating the Dream
“Navigating the Dream,” centers student navigation strategies at the intersection of the Opportunity Paradigm and institutional prestige-seeking. Food insecure students at prestige-oriented universities show awareness of what constitutes the ideal/normal experience; expectations that they have, to various degrees, internalized and around which they have tried to orient their own experiences. But the contradictions of daily life, of which food is an important element, are obvious, frustrating, and often painful. This part details how these inconsistencies require adaptive strategies, structured around a typology of five navigational strategies, each with their own internal logic, opportunities, and liabilities.
"It’s rough, because it’s like everything here, for the most part, I feel has been positive… [but] it makes me feel like I’m half of a lucky person."
- Tia (sophomore; Private Research University)
"I’m a first-generation college student. I grew up in a working-class community, I attended a predominately White institution, and struggled to find community and just felt like a fish out of water. And have since then kind of devoted my career to ensuring that this incredibly significant period in students’ lives is maximized to its fullest potential. That students not only survive their collegiate experience, but they actually thrive while they’re here.
- Charles (Administrator; Private Research University)
"Honestly, just being where I’m at feels like a miracle and a movie and this triumph story, but it shouldn’t be that way. It should never . . . it doesn’t always have to be a struggle. It doesn’t always have to be this other thing. Like a miracle doesn’t need to happen for people to get their basic necessities..."
- Gavin (junior; Flagship University)