The pursuit of higher education is one of those personal milestones, like owning a house and becoming financially independent, that has traditionally been associated with the good life in America. Over the last century, going to college essentially replaced the...

In the United States today, the idea of “famine” is something we tend to associate with fiction and the distant past, not our own lives. News stories warn us of housing troubles, poverty and homelessness, but not of nationwide food shortages that endanger human lives....