TO THE EDITOR:
Great article by Morgan Nguyen, "Students react to meal plan update, ASG pursues change." The proposed meal plans are not flexible and do not work for my daughter or many of her friends. I would like to see the buffet swipes allowed at the a la carte food locations, as that is where she eats most of her meals.
Although flexibility is an issue, it's only part of the story. The proposed meal plan will severely overcharge for the food actually consumed. My choices are to purchase 200+ buffet meals that my daughter will not use (and will not roll over) or pay $2,850 for $1,200 in average a la carte food purchases.
Students are not eating three buffet meals a day, and the cost of each buffet meal depends on how many buffet meals the students use. Students eat a Pop-Tart for breakfast and then a salad or a sandwich (on the run) for lunch with (maybe) one buffet-style meal a day. On top of this, these kids are eating microwave soup in their dorms - or on late nights in the architecture studio - and eating Uptown on the weekends.
These meal plans wrongly assume students eat three meals a day in the buffet-style restaurants. If you purchase the 225 buffet meals at $1,800 and get $100 anywhere money, the cost per buffet meal is (1800-100)/225 = $7.56. However, if you consume only 100 buffet meals in a semester, you still are paying $1,700, or $17 per buffet meal. If you, as my daughter does, only consume 50 buffet meals per term, the cost per meal is $34.
The single declining balance option is worse. I will pay $2,850 for $1,200 in average a la carte food purchases. Even though the declining balance rolls over, I am required to purchase another $2,850 in food plan the following semester. This accumulating balance becomes an asset to the university upon graduation. If no changes are made to the proposed food plans, the annual impact will be paying for buffet meals that I did not use or paying nearly $6,000 for $2,400 in food purchases. This overcharging is staggering and amounts to 240 percent of the food actually consumed.
I have contacted the H.O.M.E office and they appear to believe in the value of their new meal plans. I offer this analogy to the H.O.M.E. office: Would the university stand behind a policy that requires all students to purchase every book at the campus bookstore for the first two years and then allow the campus bookstore to charge 240 percent as much as any other bookstore in town? That's what these proposed meal plans do.
Where is the "Love and Honor?"
A concerned parent, Michael Staley