Soup the first course for poor students

from The Australian

Dorothy Illing

IN winter it offers pumpkin, mushroom or tomato soup with a chunk of Turkish bread. In summer it's a juice bar.
So popular has the soup kitchen become at Murdoch University in Perth that, on average, 16 litres is consumed by students every 40minutes.

"The sad thing is we see quite a lot of regulars turn up at a certain hour to ensure they've got that bit for the day," student guild manager Gerry Georgatos says.

About one in five students at Murdoch University are classified as having low socioeconomic status. Many are the first generation in their family to go to university.

The soup kitchen, which began last year and runs two days a week, is one of a number of schemes the guild runs to help disadvantaged students.

Among them are recycled clothes, hampers, textbook vouchers, recycled electrical goods and a used computer service that last year distributed 7000 recycled computers, half of them to Perth students, the rest to communities in need in Australia and overseas. Georgatos says the guild is using practical ways to assist the growing number of students who live below the poverty line.

"There is no point forever arguing for governments to address the hidden poverty of students.

"In our case we decide to do what we can to address poverty with our patchwork solutions and assist in ensuring they stay in education long enough to graduate," he says.

Last year the guild carried out a welfare survey of students at Murdoch University.

About 20 per cent of the 667 students who responded said their total average fortnightly income was less than $200.

For more than half it was less than $400, and for 68 per cent it was less than $500 a fortnight.

About 2500 of the 10,881 students at Murdoch are healthcare card holders.

The guild's education vice-president Eden Ridgeway says a growing number of students work and they are "definitely working longer hours". That has affected how many turn up to lectures.

She says universities need to adopt more flexible ways of helping students engage when they need to spend so much time off campus.

She suggests providing lecture notes on the web, recordings of lectures and repeat lectures are some of the ways they can do this.

Georgatos predicts the financial situation will get worse for students as the cost of rent, books, HECS and other living expenses rises.

"It's a hidden poverty: sometimes it's actually disguised because they say student poverty is part and parcel of life when you're young," he says.