Despite what H&D's new plan may claim, meal swipes were already unlimited
Editor’s Note: This is a guest opinion that has been submitted by a member of the Rice community. The views expressed in this opinion are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the Thresher or its editorial board. All guest opinions are fact-checked to the best of our ability and edited for clarity and conciseness by Thresher editors.
Imagine an on-campus student moves into their dorm the Saturday before classes start and stays three full days after the latest possible final exam. Imagine this student eats three meals a day, every day, at a servery. Imagine this student never orders Uber Eats, never goes to a restaurant, never gets a meal from a college or club event and never sle eps through breakfast. Imagine this student never travels during weekends, mid-semester recess or Thanksgiving break. Over the course of the semester, this student would eat 354 meals.
Let's see how the mandatory on-campus meal plan covers this student. The previous plan offered 375 swipes for $3,050 per semester, meaning our servery-loving student would have 21 swipes left over. Under the new plan, which charges $3,200 for unlimited swipes, visitor swipes are capped at 10 per semester. Even for the most avid servery eater, the unlimited plan charges $150 more and takes away over half of the swipes a user would have left over to use for off-campus friends after eating three meals a day, every day.
The most glaring issue with this change is that the modal on-campus student is nothing like the individual described above. On-campus students regularly end the semester with dozens or even over a hundred swipes unused. H&D should know this – surely data on meal plan balances, which pop up for students with every swipe, are readily available for H&D to use when making policy decisions. Looking at two to three years of bloated leftover swipe balances and declaring that students are worrying about rationing meals, the justification given for creating an unlimited plan, is at best laughably ignorant and at worst actively misleading.
On its face, the old on-campus meal plan may seem like a bargain – $3,050 for 375 swipes and $100 Tetra is $7.87 a meal. With every unused swipe, however, this figure balloons. Take our imaginary student from earlier. At 354 meals, they pay $8.33 a meal. Now take a more typical student (like me when I lived on campus), who ends the semester with 50 swipes left over. Each meal now costs $9.08.
Under the unlimited plan, paying $3,200 for 354 swipes and $100 Tetra puts you at $8.76 per meal. Paying it for 325 swipes is $9.54. Moreover, switching to an unlimited plan removes students' ability to even calculate this cost-per-meal figure. You can't complain about being overcharged for water chicken if you don't know how much you're even paying.
The students who do ration meals are the off-campus ones without meal plans. On-campus students who end their semesters with large swipe balances have consistently voiced desires to donate swipes beyond the limits imposed by the current donation system, which is why OC guest swipe culture began in the first place. If H&D wants to address food access, it would be far better off continuing to expand the donation system and revising unnecessarily strict servery entrance regulations. Has anyone else been told they need to swipe to grab a glass of water?
The new system where guest swipes are in a separate pool from cardholder swipes is ripe for mismanagement and bureaucratic bloat. On-campus students who want to lend a swipe to their OC peers are not going to enter the servery as a unit, swipe for themselves and then request a deduction from their guest balance. Instead, they will give the ID to their friend, who will present it in the servery as an unlimited swipe. What is the response for this? Will H&D now be doing photo verification for servery admission? In addition to stretching serveries' massive lunch lines even longer, such a policy would be deeply harmful for students whose name or appearance doesn't match the ID they were given freshman year.
Couching this decision in a professed commitment to "access, equity, and wellness" when those most impacted by the policy are low-income and off-campus students is insulting. The only cause being advanced here is that of extorting the most possible money out of students who are forced to purchase this meal plan, including returning students who signed housing agreements in the spring and are now being blindsided by this change. I urge the student body and the Student Association to contest this policy. We deserve better. Or, at the very least, we don't deserve worse than what we had last year.
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