Being a college student is a stressful and highly demanding role, especially for students carrying additional challenges such as external obligations, housing instability, food insecurity, financial hardships, or navigating life as a member of a marginalized group. Feeling emotionally depleted, or wondering if you’ve “got what it takes” to be successful is not a reflection of your abilities as a student, or your abilities to be successful in this class. You have already been externally evaluated and were admitted to this program. You deserve to be here. It is not my job as an instructor to evaluate your worthiness as a student, that has already been determined. It is my job to help you grow and be successful towards your future educational and career goals. Please feel free to reach out to me at any time if you find you are struggling with being successful in this course or at this institution, even if those struggles are not academic in nature. Below is a short-list of additional resources near campus.

Why we need to think beyond basic needs.

The first time I encountered the term basic needs statement was in a tweet from Sara Goldrick-Rab. Goldrick-Rab’s research on food insecurity and financial instability across the US confronts pervasive myths about the lived experiences of college students.  The idea that the majority of college students have their expenses covered by their parents, live in dorms with generous meal plans, spend holidays with family, and carry a part time job for spending money is a myth. Results from a large-scale survey administered by Goldrick-Rab’s team reveal that more than a third of four-year college students at campuses across the nation reported food insecurity, and about one in ten reported experiencing homelessness in the last year. Goldrick-Rab isn’t the only researcher to find such results. In 2015 The University of California system reported an estimated 45 percent of students in a randomly administered, system-wide, survey reported high or moderate levels of food insecurity. If you think a substantial number of students at UCLA or UC Berkeley don’t struggle with keeping meals on the table, you are wrong.

A needs statement is a way of formally acknowledging in your syllabus the potential challenges students may be facing with securing basic needs such as housing and food. I want to be incredibly clear, we allshould be including a basic needs statement on our syllabi. If you still do not believe a basic needs statement applies to your students, then I suggest you take the time to get to know them, especially the ones you perceive as disconnected, lazy, or not academically up to speed. You will be amazed what you learn about your students when you check your assumptions and listen. As emphatic as I am that a basic needs statement should be a mandatory component of every syllabus, I think we can expand our definition of basic needs beyond what is commonly discussed. The basic needs statements I have encountered typically cover issues of housing and food insecurity. I believe we need to go further. As a first-generation college student from a low-income family, I have my own experience of what constitutes basic needs.

Along with the stress of wondering how bills were going to be paid and how tuition was going to be covered came a litany of psychological and emotional burdens that are all but synonymous with being the first in the family to go to college, or coming from a low-income family. Sitting in a classroom doesn’t erase the reality that your mother can’t get adequate healthcare, your brother can’t post bail, or that your sister is homeless. These may sound like extremes, but I experienced all of these while in college, and much more. I guarantee there are students in your classes facing similar challenges. From my experience, the emotional and psychological effects of poverty were just as detrimental to my academic success as the direct financial burden.

So, I expanded my definition of basic needs to incorporate emotional and psychological health. In doing so, it became obvious that allmy students need to hear how important their basic needs are, not just my students facing immediate financial emergencies. My practice background is in counseling first generation and low-income students in the transition to college. When I reflected on the students who struggled the most in the transition to college and why, it was often students who were underrepresented on campus, and their academic struggles were almost always rooted in non-academic challenges. So, I added language specifically addressing hardships faced by underrepresented students, because in my classroom, feeling seen, heard, and included are basic needs.

But, even this didn’t feel like enough. Basic needs statements often encourage students to reach out to the instructor. But what would I do if a student reached out to me? Encouraging students to seek you out as a resource is a start, but what if they actually take you up on that offer? Will you flounder, sound uncomfortable, or tell them you need to get back to them? These aren’t the verbal and physical cues we want to give our students who are telling us they are struggling at the most basic level. No. If you are going to put a basic needs statement on your syllabus, you need to have an action plan that connects students to viable resources.

This year I took it upon myself to include a short list of resources on my syllabus, including the contact information for a food pantry, emergency housing shelter, counseling services, and supports for marginalized students. But, as colleague recently pointed out, asking educators to develop their own list of basic-need resources is not only inefficient, it exacerbates existing inequalities in the academy. The individuals likely to undertake the development for such a list are  most likely the same individuals supporting underrepresented and marginalized students in a litany of other ways. Our students have real and significant needs, and it should not fall to the same small group of individuals to address those needs time and time again. Developing a contact list of basic-needs resources on or around campus is a task that should fall to university administration, either within the Dean of Students office or within Student Affairs. An abridged version of this list should follow every basic-needs statement on every syllabus on campus. Proactively providing a short list of resources in a platform that reaches all students ensures resources reach our most vulnerable students, particularly those who may never have reached out for help.

For those concerned that including a basic needs statement may be overstepping professional boundaries, patronizing, or coddling students, let me reassure you it is not. Adding a needs statement to your syllabus does not put you in the position of someone’s therapist, or mother, or social worker. What it does is bring your humanity to the table, and create a space where students can bring their humanity to the table too. The robots may be coming for all of our jobs, but for now we still have classrooms, and we still have the glorious opportunity to be present with the humans inside them. Let’s make sure our students know we see them, all of them.