Our Students are Hungry: Food Insecurity Impacts More Than We Knew, Part 2 — Structuring First-Year Retention at a Regional Public Institution: Validating and Refining Bowman’s Model

By: Daniel A. Collier and Dan Fitzpatrick

Last week my colleague, Dan Fitzpatrick, and I wrote about the factors that correlate with being more food insecure, and about how food insecurity links both with students’ non-cognitive attributes and with first-semester performance and persistence.

This week we discuss the casual influences of food insecurity on first-year students’ incoming non-cognitive attributes and college performance and persistence. As higher education researchers are still in the early phases of understanding college student food insecurity, the field has not had many opportunities to conduct causal research on the matter — some papers exist but none that we are aware of examining persistence as the outcome. In addition to the fact that food insecurity research remains in an emergent stage, few research agendas are able (or intend) to capture the robust non-cognitive and engagement data that our project did.

This type of study is important because the causal nature of the analysis allows us to correctly understand how food insecurity influences first-year students’ non-cognitive attributes, engagement, college performance, and ultimately fall-to-fall retention. This type of research can make a stronger case regarding the importance of the…