In a meeting room high atop Hunter College's East Building, a group of undergraduates are discussing the trials and tribulations of life as a college student. With the shades drawn to block out the midday sun, the five women sit around and swap stories. They talk about commuting, about juggling time commitments, about the long hours of schoolwork that are a college student's lot.
City Limits Magazine
July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget
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"Yeah, mine too," replies her classmate Sharon Jones. "It's just constant. But where do you go? And kids need to be taken care of."
The conversation turns to other topics: How to study on the train in order to make it from class to your job without being late, dreaming of being able to afford to move into an apartment or even the dorms. Someone mentions the latest round of CUNY tuition hikes that came with state budget cuts: an extra $150 per class.
"It's a hole," says third-year student Jannelly Lahoz. "It's like you're digging yourself deeper into the hole."
Jones nods in agreement. "I feel like I'm in it, and the dirt just keeps coming."
The students are of various ages and from different backgrounds, but they have one thing in common: They have been brought together this semester for the Community Leadership Program, a two-semester credit-bearing Hunter seminar taught by members of the Welfare Rights Initiative, a student group started in 1995 to support low-income CUNY students. They've just spent their last class role-playing how to lobby a state senator; now they've turned to discussing the methods they resort to in order to make it to class in the first place. Two decades ago, 30,000 students attended CUNY while receiving welfare benefits, but that number plummeted to about 6,000 after the city, citing the 1996 welfare reform law that limited welfare recipients to one year of postsecondary education, began cutting benefits for students unless they spent 35 hours a week on "work activities."
The exodus sparked bitter complaints from welfare advocates, particularly WRI, that the new policy was closing the most proven road out of poverty for individuals receiving welfare: higher education. HRA officials respond that they believe the most effective way to avoid being on PA long term is employment, though agency spokesperson Carmen Boon allows that "once employment is obtained, a person might decide to supplement it with training and education."
Though no one in the meeting room receives public assistance, almost everyone gets by with the help of low-income benefits of one kind or another. Decena lives with her parents, who receive food stamps and Medicaid. Stephanie Benjamin, a senior sociology major, gets food stamps to supplement her part-time job; she tried to apply for PA but changed her mind when she learned her husband would need to attend HRA's Back to Work program because his part-time job at a day care center didn't meet the 30-hour-a-week threshold. Jones lives on about $24,000 a year in Social Security income. "I don't get food stamps," she says. "I don't get book money. I don't get transportation money. I have no computer."
