Students without access to sufficient food are more likely to drop out of university, a new survey suggests, with almost half of the student body at a Paris institution reporting some form of food insecurity.

A team of academics at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (USPN) surveyed the institution’s students, asking about their access to food as well as their academic, financial and living situations.

The researchers asked about two forms of food insecurity: quantitative food insecurity, defined as “not having access to enough food”, and qualitative food insecurity, or “not having access to the desired food”.

The results “highlight the significant burden of food insecurity in the student population, exacerbating health and academic challenges for those already socio-economically deprived,” the authors conclude.

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Alice Bellicha and Henri Dehove, two of the study’s authors, said they had anticipated high rates of food insecurity because the French department where the university is located – Seine-Saint-Denis, in the greater Paris area – has a higher rate of poverty than the French average.

The findings “confirmed our concerns”, they told ����Vlog, with almost half of students reporting some type of food insecurity: 11 per cent of respondents said they did not have access to enough food, while 35 per cent said they didn’t have access to the desired food.

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Students living away from home, lacking sufficient cooking facilities or experiencing financial difficulties were more likely to experience food insecurity, as were those who had received their high school diploma overseas and those using food assistance.

A lack of sufficient food, the researchers found, was associated with higher dropout rates: almost a third of respondents who didn’t have enough food reported dropping out, as did almost a quarter of those without access to their desired food, compared with 16 per cent of “food-secure” students.

“This suggests that food insecurity is not only a matter of public health but also one of academic success and social inequality,” said Bellicha and Dehove.

Student precarity in France “has become a growing concern for public authorities and higher education institutions” since the Covid pandemic, the researchers told THE. Indeed, the Federation of General Student Associations reported last year that almost a fifth of French students did not have enough to eat, based on a survey of more than 7,500 people.

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“These findings should alert public authorities and prompt them to rethink public policies, whether in the areas of social support, housing, food assistance programmes or the reception of international students,” Bellicha and Dehove said.

Potential actions, proposed at a USPN student assembly, could include “selling unsold food at low prices in university cafeterias, updating the eligibility criteria for student grants and extending the opening hours of university cafeterias to enable students to have dinner there”, they said.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com