First Year Eats: A First Attempt at Combating Food Insecurity on College Campuses

Abstract

First Year Eats (FYE) is a new program on Texas A&M’s campus dedicated to teaching freshmen how to cook from the comfort of their dorms while providing them with the resources necessary to do so. To assess the impact of FYE on students, we compare the Fall semester final GPA’s of students who participated with a fitting control group of students who did not participate. We estimate the impact of FYE on student GPA’s for various demographic subsets of students using a bootstrap linear regression on a host of indicator variables including an indicator for involvement in FYE. The results show that FYE participants have a higher average GPA than non-participants across all demographic strata. This effect is found statistically insignificant, but we do find a significant association between FYE participation and differential GPA across income strata. We speculate on causes of this and points of future research, as well as make suggestions to the FYE team regarding potential improvements to the program going forward.