Congratulations, that’s completely right! And your contrastive は analysis is also correct. The sentence really is comparing the amount of money given to each type of student.
@Zizka I don’t want to scare anybody, but I honestly think it can potentially go on forever until all the describing is done. It was probably implicit in the very technical description of the Japanese language that you once copied from Wikipedia for me. In English and in French, we indicate attributive chains with words like ‘that’ or “qui” or “que”, and they come after the noun that’s being described, so we’re used to starting with the noun as a reference point and tagging things on until the description is clearly finished. In Japanese though, it’s the other way around. There are no markers like ‘that’ aside from という, and we can only interpret exactly what a phrase means when the noun it’s describing appears. Our thought process needs to change: we have to start with a core, and then keep adding information to that core until we know exactly what its function is. It is overwhelming at first, because we’re doing the complete opposite of what we do in our native languages, but it makes sense after a while, because you learn to package things and kind of ‘leave them there’ as you process the rest of the sentence.
One of my favourite examples is from volume 18 of the Shield Hero light novel (partly because I can understand it now, whereas I had immense difficulty reading it one year ago). I probably can’t quote it exactly, but that’s just as well, because that way I won’t be infringing any copyrights 
:
出された飯をもりもりと食べる食欲魔人を見習って欲しいもんだ。
I think that’s what was said. How to parse it:
- 出された飯を - a meal that’s put out. It’s an object.
- もりもりと食べる - to energetically eat. It’s the verb that acts on 出された飯. It’s in the plain form, so…
- 食欲魔人を - ‘appetite demons’ i.e. people who can eat a lot. It’s modified by the phrase ending in 食べる, and the plain form indicates that that’s a characteristic. They always eat what’s put in front of them, and they’re not just doing it right now. That whole block is the object of…
4.見習って - to learn from the example of. It’s followed by…
5.欲しいもんだ=欲しいものだ - to want. もの だ is a structure using もの to emphasise someone’s opinion or feelings.
So, if I were to indicate where all the attributive block layers are, we would get:
{[(出された飯)をもりもりと食べる食欲魔人]を見習って欲しい}もんだ。
A Japanese sentence is like an onion. It’s almost always possible to add something else at the end of a sentence in order to give it another function. Maybe I’m just fortunate that Chinese attributive phrases are like that too, so I had a little bit of practice beforehand (the difference being that in Chinese, we use 的 as a marker after verbs, so it’s a bit clearer).
As @YanagiPablo explained, 生活『が』is just part of the attributive phrase describing ‘students whose lives have become terribly difficult’. The subject of 出します is probably just implied somewhere in the article, maybe in the preceding sentence. It’s most likely the government or some student aid organisation. When people say Japanese is a ‘context-heavy’ language, it’s really because you sometimes have to look back at previous sentences in order to determine who or what is involved, especially since pronouns are rare in Japanese.