Designing the College Experience to Fight Scarcity

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With fall classes set to begin in less than a month, student services are gearing up for the influx of activity and professors are putting ­­­­the final touches on their syllabi. As part of these preparations, many of us are considering how to best support our students who face significant financial challenges while attending college. To this end, we need to understand the psychological impact of scarcity, and how it affects our brains in predictable and pervasive ways.

What is Scarcity?

Think about the last time you had a tight deadline to meet. When once it was so hard to sit down and write that grant or grade those papers, suddenly you were laser-focused and completed your task in the nick of time. Your behavior was a function of scarcity: when you had an abundance of time your mind wandered, but when you were short on time your brain saved you with its remarkable capacity to zero in on problems and resolve them. While you (like many others) may fallaciously believe that you “thrive under pressure,” that’s really just your brain hardwired to deal with a scarcity of time.

Unfortunately, scarcity thinking is only helpful when we have the capacity to fix it, and we now know that many of our students are persistently in a scarcity mindset. The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice reemphasized in April 2019 the staggering number of U.S. students dealing with financial insecurity on college campuses nationwide. Among nearly 86,000 students attending 123 colleges:

• 45% experienced food insecurity in the past 30 days
• 56% experienced housing insecurity in the past year
• 17% experienced homelessness in the past year

These challenges are not just stressful; they fundamentally alter how students think. When they should be listening to their professor, or studying, or recalling the atomic weight of erbium, these students are instead worried about putting food on the table or getting kicked off their friend’s couch. Scarcity-driven thoughts are intrusive, persistent, and can be elicited by circumstances that go generally unnoticed by the more affluent among us. In short, uncertainty about one’s basic needs undermines the learning process and inhibits student success.

How Harmful is Scarcity Thinking?

Sendhil Mullainathan of the University of Chicago and Eldar Shafir of Princeton have extensively studied the cognitive impact of scarcity. In a now-famous experiment, they wanted to determine how financial concerns impact fluid intelligence. They gave New Jersey mall-goers an IQ test right after they asked them to consider the following scenario:

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Imagine that your car has some trouble, which requires a ($300 or $3000) service. Your auto insurance will cover half the cost. You need to decide whether to go ahead and get the car fixed or to take a chance and hope that it lasts for a while longer. How would you go about making such a decision? Financially, would it be an easy or difficult decision for you to make?

Thinking about a $150 payment didn’t have a noticeable impact on how people performed on the test. But when everyday people considered how they would drum up $1,500 on short notice, the impact of scarcity emerged: Less affluent people did worse on the test. How much worse? According to Mullainathan and Shafir, these individuals would’ve been better off staying up all night before taking the test rather than being distracted by financial scarcity.

So when you consider all of the forms of scarcity that our students face at any one time (e.g., food, shelter, finances), it should become a priority to account for scarcity when designing the college experience. Can we even begin to imagine how hard it is, under those circumstances, to analyze themes in The Canterbury Tales or to master a welding torch? Here are some ideas for helping students succeed when facing these pressing needs.

Building College for Scarcity

The obvious (but by no means easy) solution to scarcity is to fix it. As I wrote about for SchoolHouse Connection, there are numerous resources available to help colleges build internal supports for students’ basic needs, such as emergency aid programs, food pantries, housing programs, and systems to redistribute unused food. Additionally, many students are eligible for public programs such as SNAP (for now, at least), but are unaware of this fact or struggle with the application process. And, of course, we must ensure that all students complete the FAFSA annually and claim every penny of aid to which they're entitled. The more we can eliminate scarcity, the better our students will be able to learn and perform.

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The complement to reducing scarcity is increasing slack (and, no, I don’t mean giving college students an addictive work-chat platform). People preoccupied with scarcity lack cognitive bandwidth, so slack is when we simplify complex tasks so they just don’t need as much bandwidth to get things done. If we look at college programs through a scarcity lens, we see that initiatives like guided pathways reduce the bandwidth necessary to enroll in courses and track one’s progress toward a degree.

Consolidating student services into one location, à la Single Stop reduces the bandwidth required for students to get the help they need to stay enrolled. Colleges should evaluate any process with a short window of opportunity, or with multiple steps to completion, which could unfairly disadvantage students prone to scarcity. Systems that create slack, such as wait-listing all students for a popular pre-requisite course and then enrolling students by lottery, could reduce those inequities.

Building the Classroom for Scarcity

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We should also take scarcity into account when designing classes. Mullainathan and Shafir studied Indian farmers who, because of the harvest cycle of sugarcane, get paid infrequently and in a large, lump sum. Sugarcane farmers, therefore, tend to be broke right before the harvest, and relatively rich immediately after it. In the same way that worrying about money made New Jerseyans less intelligent, getting paid “increased” farmers’ IQ by about 10 points.

So consider how your syllabus could account for scarcity. Scheduling a test for the last day of the month could be problematic for students trying to make rent or running low on SNAP. On the contrary, students may have more bandwidth on a day when the college cuts checks or distributes aid. When students are unable to avoid the financial circumstances troubling their minds, providing motivational opportunities such as expressive writing or a values affirmation exercise may help them to set aside those worries so they can make it through their next class. Although there is never going to be a practical solution that works for every student’s circumstances, considering scarcity in your class design will move you in a more student-centered direction.

As educators, we’re uniquely interested in learning: how the brain synthesizes, stores, and retrieves knowledge. We must align our understanding of this process with how the brain restricts learning when dealing with more pressing matters, such as hunger and homelessness. Only when we appreciate the deleterious impact of scarcity on our students’ cognitive bandwidth can we prepare to keep these students on track despite the most trying of circumstances.