After months of back-and-forth about how the program would be paid for, late this summer, Seattle’s public school system joined the thousands of districts nationwide that cover meals for every student, regardless of income, while they are in class.
As school is back in session throughout much of the US, a growing number of children are eating at school through universal meal programs. According to federal data, the number of students enrolled in schools that offer such programs has more than tripled since the 2016-2017 school year.
The funding comes from many sources. Some cities, like Seattle, and states, like New York, fund their own universal school meals programs, but many schools pay for free-for-students breakfasts and lunch with federal dollars. The government’s National School Lunch Program is the second largest food and nutrition assistance program in the United States, spending roughly $17.2 billion from October 1, 2024, to September 30, 2025. The program provided funding for more than 4.87 billion lunches according to U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.
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Experts who spoke to Scientific American said these programs can have broad benefits, including on student test scores, absenteeism and food insecurity.
“To me, it’s the best thing since free sliced bread,” says Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor of public policy at the University of Delaware. “In terms of an intervention, it's cheap compared to almost any of the other things that you might be thinking of to improve your school.”
In a study looking at New York City middle schools, Schwartz and a colleague found the implementation of universal free meals programs raised math scores by as much as 0.083 standard deviations and English scores by 0.059 for students who were not poor — roughly three and two percentile points for a student in the middle of the pack — with smaller but significant gains of 0.032 and 0.027 respectively for poor students.
Orgul Ozturk, a professor of economics at the University of South Carolina, said she was inspired to write a paper on universal meal programs after her child’s school implemented one. Ozturk and her coauthors used student-level data to show that elementary schools in South Carolina that implemented free meals programs saw math state standardized test scores rise by about 0.06 standard deviations.
“I think you see variation on who benefits, and definitely the effects are heterogeneous — it doesn't impact everyone in the same way,” Ozturk says. “And benefits are positive, even when they are small, considering it's not a very costly program in some ways.”
But a recent working paper analyzing the results of 42 different studies concluded that school meal programs in high-income economies had minimal effects on students’ behavioral, health or education outcomes.
Despite limited academic literature describing its benefits, some have called for federal meals programs to be defunded.
“Subsidizing school food is an outdated use of federal dollars,” said Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, in a report last year. “Congress should repeal school food programs to reduce budget deficits and hand power back to the states.”
To better understand the effect of free meals on school performance, Scientific American analyzed two datasets to examine the relationship between universal free meals programs and districts’ test scores. We used publicly available standardized test score estimates from the Stanford Education Data Archive as well as federal data that show which schools participate in programs providing funding for free meals under the federal Community Eligibility Provision as well as Provisions 2 and 3 of the National School Lunch Program.
The analysis, which covered three school years before the coronavirus pandemic (2016–2017, 2017–2018 and 2018–2019) and two after (2022–2023 and 2023–2024), found that free meals programs were associated with 1.6 grade level lower reading scores and roughly 1.66 grade level lower math test scores when compared to schools without universal lunch programs, though the gap shrinks to about two-thirds of a grade level lower when accounting for demographic factors like poverty, race, district size and whether the school district lies in an urban or rural area. We excluded states that had their own universal free meals programs in the relevant school year and, to avoid skew, those whose state’s data for that school year appeared to be an outlier when compared to other sources. We also excluded schools who did not report their universal meals status.
When comparing 1,452 pairs of school districts that fed every student for free to districts in the same state of a similar size, poverty level and community type that did not provide free meals, during the 2023–2024 school year districts with federal meal programs scored on average 1.14 grade levels lower in math and 1.08 grade levels lower in reading.
We also compared each district’s test scores with its own scores in other years, accounting for changes in poverty and yearly shifts shared across districts. We found no clear link between changes in the share of students covered by universal free meals and changes in math or reading scores. None of the analyses we conducted could definitively show one way or another whether universal free lunch programs caused scores to change; they only showed the associations between scores and the existence of meal programs.
Experts who discussed our analysis with us said the Stanford data may have gaps in reporting that may skew the results, and that more granular data at the student level may be needed to show the true effects of these programs. Differences in how and why schools implement the program, such as the nutritional quality of meals provided, how long students had to eat lunch and the student's background, also play a role, the experts said.
“The reason why you sometimes get mixed findings [in published scientific studies] is for a couple different reasons,” says Juliana Cohen, a professor of nutrition and public health at Merrimack College and adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Some studies, what they've really found, is that you see improvements in test scores among kids who are food insecure.”
Experts suggested that the greatest direct benefit would likely be to children just above the cutoff for other subsidized meal programs and for those who were eligible for means-tested free meal programs but did not take advantage of them.
“This actually has a really profound impact on children's diets, especially those that are at greatest risk for food insecurity and adverse health outcomes,” Cohen says.
“There are a large number of students in these schools who are maybe just above those thresholds that likely are still, maybe not food insecure, but still struggling to make ends meet,” says Michelle Marcus, an associate professor of economics at Vanderbilt University.
Marcus and some of the other researchers say it is likely too early to determine the long-term impacts of universal free school meal programs on students in the U.S. but that even small benefits on things like test scores could compound in economic impact over time.
Universal free school meal programs may have benefits beyond just helping students; they may also benefit their family's finances. A 2021 working paper estimated that the indirect effects of these programs reduced grocery shopping costs by about 4.5 percent for the median household by 2016. The researchers also found that after local schools adopted the program, grocery spending by households with school-aged children fell by about 7 percent relative to households without children.
Even households outside of areas with universal meal programs may reap the benefits. The researchers found that many grocery chains charge the same prices across their stores, so price cuts driven by one area's free meals reach the chain's shoppers elsewhere.
Perhaps the most robust finding in all the scientific literature: schools that have universal free lunch programs get more students lunch in the first place.
“I want to shed light on something I heard from many students: food security is safety,” said Sabi Yoon, a recent graduate of the Seattle school system and member of the School Meals & Food Education Working Group, in a statement. “After speaking with students from diverse communities and backgrounds, we learned that being safe can also mean knowing if they will have access to a healthy meal at school, or even a meal at all.”