How Much is Your Meal Plan Costing You?

Dining Hall Meal Plans

(Everyone loves dining hall food)

It should come as no surprise to most Grinnellians that we are really being conned when it comes to the paying for our semesterly meal plans at the college.

How much exactly are we paying and how much should we be paying?

After a friend brought up his initial calculations, I thought it might be worth looking into. Then I stumbled on a GUM article by Joe Wlos ‘15 that did just that. So I’m just going to expand on some of the things he brought up in that article.

Cost of Plan versus Cost at the Door

How much money would we gain (or lose) if we decided to buy the same amount of meals offered by our plans at the door?

The first graph shows a side by side comparison while the graph below shows the difference between cost at the door and current price of the plan.

The cost at the door was calculated by assuming 14 weeks of usage and the number of meals per week in each plan was split up evenly across breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with the exception of the off-campus meal plans. That value was added to the amount of dining dollars allotted and the amount of guest meals (assuming those meals are all going towards dinner). [Here is the table that I’ve adapted from the GUM’s article.]

This should immediately indicate to you, my friends on the 10 Plus meal plan, that we are being seriously overcharged. The difference between what we would pay at the door and the amount we are paying now was calculated to be $852.00. No amount of Chocolate Lasagna in the world is worth that much.

Price per Meal to Amount of Meals per Semester

The size of the bubbles indicate how many meals per semester the plan covers, while (as indicated by the legend) the darker color indicates a higher price per meal that the plan covers.

Yet again, we see that on the 10 Plus meal plan, we got the shortest possible end of the stick. We’ve got a midsized number of meals (140 meals assuming a 14 week semester) and are paying $2835.00 per semester, translating to $20.25 PER MEAL.

I’m sure the operating costs of the dining hall are high but there are certainly still some cost-cutting measures that could be implemented to make it less burdensome on the student population. Looking at the meal plans of similar colleges, I found that most dining halls allow meals to roll over into the following weeks, offered unlimited dining, or a wider variety of dining options.

There are simple measures that the dining hall could easily implement that would benefit most of the student body without being taxing on the staff, but until they decide to introduce some change make sure you’re filling up those to-go boxes.