$5,500 — that’s how much it costs to eat unlimited meals at Boston University for one year. Except that it’s really not one year, it’s more like eight months — and that price only includes on-campus eats, not any of the inevitable groceries and extra meals that students buy over the course of a school year. Seems pretty pricey, right?
In contrast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports the cost of food for an average American adult to be well under $4,000 — and that number covers all eating expenses for an entire year, not just the majority of food costs for two-thirds of it. It doesn’t take much to see that this disparity is insane.
BU students are watching thousands of dollars go down the drain on food that they often don’t want or even worse, don’t end up eating. And they have no other choice. Unless you have a kitchen or live off-campus, you’re stuck. BU actually requires that you purchase a meal plan, whether you want to or not.
But is this really so bad? Every campus tour guide will tell you that BU has some of the best dining halls in the country — and they’re not wrong. BU Dining offers healthy, locally sourced, high-quality food, and they offer tons of different options of it. But the fact still remains that eating meals at college shouldn’t break the bank — regardless of how good the food is.
An article in The Boston Globe on Tuesday reminded us that this issue is not unique to BU. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, students eat in award-winning dining halls complete with boujee buffet tables, infused waters and food “fit for a glamour shot in a high-end food magazine.” But they too pay the price, just $100 less than BU students, with meal plans starting at $5,400 a year. At Northeastern and Tufts, prices are even higher.
The cost of on-campus dining these days borders on the absurd. Sure, there are expenses involved in running a dining hall — paying workers, keeping up the facility, and so on. But that’s not the point. The point is that students don’t want to be constrained by these strangling meal plans. So why are we forcing them to?
It’s clear that BU didn’t create these policies without reason — they want to make sure their students are fed. And that’s a noble goal. College students are simultaneously obsessed with looking as best as they can while spending the least that they can. This is a dangerous combination when it comes to eating. Without the dining hall, it could be all too tempting for students to starve themselves, without even noticing they’re doing it.
But allowing students to not buy meal plans wouldn’t mean the demise of the dining hall. In fact, it could mean that even more students eat there, just in a way that works better for them. A pay-as-you-go model would make dining on campus a reasonably priced endeavor, and a much more flexible one at that. Older students especially have jobs and internships that keep them off-campus a good portion of the time. It’s just impractical to try and restrain them to kinds of meal plans that BU offers.
This is such a simple solution to such an unnecessary problem. Switching to a new system would certainly have its growing pains, but it would be well worth the cost. All it would do is better serve the students of BU. Isn’t that the whole point?
In the world of on-campus dining models, pay-as-you-go is the clear winner. Students could pay for their food a’la carte instead of all-you-can-eat — and save thousands in the process. Everyone would win. Sometimes, all you want is a banana for breakfast. You shouldn’t need to spend $14 swiping into the dining hall for that.
