Bon Appétit

As summer approaches, many students with meal plans are scrambling to use up their excess meals and points before they expire at the end of the term. Under the mandatory first-year meal plans currently in place, prepaid meals go to waste because students have too few opportunities to use them. The University should remodel its meal plans by eliminating Barnard and first-year points and replacing them with Dining Dollars, allowing all first-year meals to roll over, and permitting students to swipe multiple times each meal.

Dining Services requires every Columbia or Barnard first-year to spend over $2,000 per term on one of four mandatory meal plans, with the stated goal of promoting balanced nutrition and a sense of community. Any meals and points that remain unused at the end of the year expire without being refunded—a common occurrence and the cause of much complaint. The situation is worse at Barnard, where first-years are required to buy an expensive "unlimited meals" plan that provides virtually continuous access to the cafeteria in Hewitt Hall. Barnard upperclassmen living on the Quad must also purchase meal plans, although theirs include limited meals and several hundred Barnard points. But since Barnard points cannot be redeemed on the Columbia campus, Barnard students who spend most of their day across the street are compelled to buy Columbia Dining Dollars in addition to their Barnard plans. These mandatory meal plans are frustrating for Columbia first-years and Barnard students who feel their money is being wasted.

Students should not be penalized for failing to use all their meals and points in the space of one academic year. Dining Services should allow all meals to roll over until graduation so students can eat meals at their leisure, rather than having to visit the dining hall religiously throughout the year. Replacing Barnard and first-year points with Dining Dollars would be a cost-effective way to bring the community together and offer more options to students. While both schools' Dining Services would have to work together to merge the two systems into a more cohesive plan, such collaboration would combine the nutrition and community of mandatory meal plans with the flexibility of Dining Dollars, which roll over from year to year.

Because they pay for their meals, students should be able to use them as they see fit. Permitting students to swipe into John Jay Dining Hall only once during each meal period precludes this choice. Not only does this one-swipe policy force students to conform to John Jay's twice-daily meal schedule, it prohibits them from bringing more than a few guests per term into the dining hall. Students should be allowed to swipe into John Jay—or swipe guests into John Jay—as many times as they wish during each meal period, with each swipe counting as a meal. Though students who swipe several times per day might use up their meals more quickly, students are the best judges of their own dietary needs. And because all meals have been prepaid, Dining Services need not worry about accruing extra costs, as could happen with unlimited meal plans.

Students have long complained about the University's meal plans, and with good reason. At the end of each year, students are reduced to swinging by the dining hall whenever they can in hopes of getting their money's worth. If the Columbia and Barnard Dining Services make their meal plans less rigid, no student will feel pressured to run to John Jay for only an apple or a drink.