“If you don’t have a college degree, it’s very difficult to get a job at all,” said Jane Jakubczak, coordinator of nutrition services at the university. “They aren’t able to ask their parents for more money because mom just lost her job, or their parents simply didn’t have the money to start with.”

For some students, Ms. Jakubczak said, “it comes down to making this decision: Do I pay for my books or do I pay for food?” These students also experience a lot of stress and anxiety over where their next meal is coming from, she added.

The University of Maryland food pantry served 170 people in the fall 2015 semester. About half of them were students, and the rest were university employees.

At Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, Teresa Tagliaferri, a recent graduate who served as site manager for the school’s pantry, said students often appeared at the end of the semester, when their prepaid meal plans ran low. “That’s when we see a larger number of people,” she said.

A report published in January by the Wisconsin Hope Lab, which studied 1,007 low- and moderate-income students at 10 Wisconsin colleges and universities, found that 30 percent of the students said they had been hungry but couldn’t afford to eat. Researchers said their findings went beyond the frequently cited college “ramen diet,” instead describing students who consistently struggle to put food on the table.

“This underscores what our previous research has found — low-income students and even some moderate-income students struggle to provide for their basic needs,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, one of the study’s authors. A Hope lab study in 2008 of low-income students at 42 colleges and universities in Wisconsin found that 71 percent of the students had changed their food-buying habits because of lack of money.

The Hope lab, a research institute at the University of Wisconsin that focuses on postsecondary education issues affecting low-income students, has recommended expanding the National School Lunch Program, which provides free lunch to about 30 million children in about 100,000 schools across the country, to college students.