How meal plans eat away at your wallet
When a friend of Communication freshman Wally Xie asked him for advice on switching meal plans, Xie’s eyes lit up as the memory of a whole quarter’s difficult search for enough food was revived.
“Oh, I totally remember that Block D I switched to,” Xie said. “I starved for the whole quarter — I was not getting enough food because I could only eat one meal a day. So this quarter I switched to Weekly 13 — and now I am finally eating.”
Northwestern claims an average of $230 profit on every Weekly 13 plan, even if each student takes full advantage of their plan. With the basic Weekly 13 plan providing hardly two meals and $0.41 points per day, why does Northwestern start freshmen off on a meal plan that is heavy on the wallet and light in available nutrition?
Alexander Gurvits, a Weinberg freshman on the Weekly 13 plan, finds that none of the meal plans are ideal.
“The meal plans are all a bit annoying,” he said over his lunch at 1835 Hinman. “This Weekly 13 — if you eat two meals a day, that will be 14. They are either too much or too little. There is not a perfect one.”
Students can’t even eat breakfast if they are trying to make the most of their meal plans. For someone without a meal plan, dinner costs $10, lunch is $8 and breakfast is $6. So someone on the Weekly 13 who eats breakfast at the dining halls would be practically throwing money away.
To combat hunger, most students have the experience of “smuggling” food out of dining halls to save for later and make up for meals they are missing in their plans.
“Instead of buying fruits from supermarkets, I just take the apples from [the] school’s dining halls,” said Weinberg freshman Andrea Hadjopulos, who is on the Weekly 13 meal plan.
Whole Foods and other off-campus eateries become a dietary supplement for students to keep up with nutrition and energy, adding even more to the already-astronomical cost of staying fed and healthy at Northwestern.
“I eat many times during the day, so I have to eat out a lot. I am spending a lot of money on food,” Hadjopulos said over a salad at Whole Foods.
The ideal meal plan varies from student to student. While a block plan did not work for Xie, Weinberg freshman Wilson Funkhouser has found it a better use of his money.
“In weekly plans, if you don’t use it up in the week, you lose it. I like block plans — the meals carries [sic] on to the next week,” said Funkhouser.
Block plans have an advantage because meals can be distributed throughout the quarter according to the student’s preference.
But even Block D, with its flexibility, can’t begin to fulfill the recommended nutrition for young adults. Some students on block plans say that the number of meals is still too limited, providing only between five and nine meals and between $7.36 and $26.90 in points per week. This means that students may not plan ahead, and find themselves with too few at the end of the quarter.
“I ate too much at the start of the quarter, so I had to starve myself for two weeks. So there was a time when I was hungry every day,” Xie said.
The Block plans are still an atrocious rip-off, financially. For Block D, using every point and converting all 74 meals to points at the highest equivalency rate, $8.50, only comes out to $788.
Block D costs $1,374, so where does the extra $588 go? University Housing and Food Service liaison Anne Vanosdel would not comment on how the University used the extra money.
Using a meal on Block D is no more financially beneficial: once all of the points are used, each meal used comes out to $16 of the plan’s cost — $4 more than dinner for non-residents, the most expensive meal offered in the dining halls.
According to Vanosdol, meal plans were decided by both the University Board and a student committee. The plans, especially the block plans, were “a direct result of the student committee’s input and desire to have portability and flexibility.”
Vanosdol said that Sodexho was chosen because it offered the greatest quality of food at the best price possible.
“And yes, I believe that the team that we have here on campus is the gold standard when it comes to food service providers,” she said.
But raise your hand if you think you ate a gold-standard breakfast today — was it worth the $10 – $17 you probably paid?
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Fed up with high dining hall prices? Make your own meals with these recipes. Or you can return home.
I think about this all the time. I wish we weren’t required to have a meal plan, this makes me really angry.
cmm
January 23, 2009 at 1:31 am
Vanosdol clearly hasn’t eaten at the dining halls. Either that or she has horrible taste.
Ginger Brew
January 23, 2009 at 3:10 pm
They’re just too expensive.
Eric
January 24, 2009 at 11:30 am
block plan D SUCKS don’t get it it’s awful i’m freaking starving all the time
Anon
January 24, 2009 at 10:02 pm
AMEN.
Keep hammering away at the university on this ridiculous shit- they nickle and dime us for anything possible. PLEASE do a feature on the laundry machines soon.
wow
January 25, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Just get on Munch Money, and make sure you clear your balance by the end of the year. It’s the only way to go.
Sajid
January 25, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Block D rules. I primarily eat at Norris, so using meal equivalency rocks. At dinnertime, you have 9 bucks to spend in the food court, plus the c store. What could be better? I eat in dining halls only about 5 or less times per week.
Willardite
January 25, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Student Committee? Really? I would like to know what group of students would ever vote for/approve/endorse a meal plan that costs $400 than it is supposed to every quarter.
omg
January 25, 2009 at 8:09 pm
As a sophomore, I’m currently searching for apartments and comparing costs with what I’m paying right now at Ayers CCI. It costs mee $6,700 to live in a double and an extra $4,500 to eat. Living in a nice apartment, with a 9 month lease, I’m not sure I would pay more than $2500 for food over the course of the year plus between 6500 and 7500 for living in the apartment. Peanut butter and jelly, homemade pasta, etc. are college meals that can be better for our health. I believe this is a huge issue at Northwestern…How much more money does the school need to crank out of the students?
Zach
January 28, 2009 at 12:34 pm
so each person wasted, on average, less than twenty bucks
hmm
January 29, 2009 at 3:40 am
4 breakfasts, 4 lunches, and 5 dinners, plus using most of my points, and I’m only wasting only about 7 dollars per WEEK? Somehow, I feel like I’m missing out on the uproar. Yeah, 7 dollars wasted sucks, but I mean…that’s not a big deal…and I think that the convenience of just having food(albeit not that great of food) readily available makes up for it.
Ginger Brew
January 29, 2009 at 6:14 am
Other things to consider:
i) This affects people on weekly plans. During Thanksgiving, students get the full 13/16/19 meals per week. However, few students during this time are on campus and these meals go to waste. The same logic applies to people who leave early during finals week. Someone who leaves Monday/Tuesday on finals week can potentially waste $100 on meals not consumed later in the week.
ii) Off campus students could use munch money and get a 5% bonus (for charges over us$100) and they could use a credit card such as the Charles Schwab Visa Signature and get 2% Cash Back. Thus, off campus students could save 6.67% more than an on campus student could simply because they have more payment options.
iii) The food is shitty.
rkb
January 29, 2009 at 6:55 pm
To me the worst part is that if you live on campus you are required to have a meal plan. While I can understand the rationale -not wanting the students to starve- it makes for a great monopoly at the same time. If you look at what we pay to eat in the dining halls I could eat in Evanston restaurants for not much more, and buy groceries etc. for _much_ less.
argh
January 29, 2009 at 8:07 pm
EXCELLENT.
I have been telling fellow students for years about how meal plans are a rip-off. If you have to eat at the dining halls, go with munch money (if NU lets you…)
Mikey J
January 31, 2009 at 11:22 pm
So, anybody got any meal plan advice for a freshman starting at NU next fall? =)
Miriam
February 1, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I save 8 dollars a week… lolrus.
Andy
February 4, 2009 at 2:51 am
our school is a total rip off.
and the meal plan is just a small part of it.
rpai
February 16, 2009 at 12:59 pm
The meal plans are absurdly expensive. It’s cheaper to pay cash, which is particularily amazing since the cash entry prices of the meals are allready enormous. Not one of the dining halls is worth $10 for dinner. At Wisconson, you pay for what food you get, it is not all you can eat. Girls usually only spend maybe $1200 a year with guys up around $2000 a year. Think about it. You could eat out for EVERY meal at any fast restaurant in Evnanston (Chipotle, Noodles, Cosi, whatever you want) for every meal, and spend lots of money at the also-overpriced Whole Foods on cereal, fruits, snakcs, etc, and still save lots of money from the school plans. Quite frankly, it’s a f*****n joke.
Adam
February 16, 2009 at 10:35 pm