A new study traces the impacts of hunger on the educational trajectories of 1,500 people over nearly two decades.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that being hungry makes it harder for college students to thrive. But while the sharp increase in campus hunger has been well documented in recent years, policy experts have had little idea until now just how much food insecurity impacts the odds that a student will actually graduate.

That impact is staggering, according to a new, nationally representative study of more than 1,500 college students over two decades. Public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that students who lacked consistent access to enough food were 43 percent less likely to graduate than their food-secure peers, and 61 percent less likely to get an advanced degree, like a master’s or doctorate, in the years that followed.

These findings mark the first time that researchers have been able to quantify the true impact of food insecurity on a student’s education over an extended period of time.

“These are meaningful numbers that speak to a serious problem,” said Julia Wolfson, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of public health at Johns Hopkins. “A higher education in this country is a primary pathway toward improving one’s economic situation. So the experience of food insecurity during college can be really detrimental if it affects one’s educational trajectory into the future.”

Even worse off were students who had been both food insecure and a first-generation college student, finding that students who fell into both categories were “least likely to graduate at all.”

Read the full article about the effects of food insecurity for college students by Jessica Fu at The Counter.