At a school my D is interested in the recommended meal plan is what they call “Flex 14” (it’s what they quote in the COA total). It gives you $450 flex dollars and 14 dining hall meals per week. The Standard 20 meal plan is $1064 cheaper. If I understand this correctly a flex dollar is equal to one regular dollar. So we are paying $1064 for zero benefit. I could have D have 20 meals a week in the dining halls and give her $450 cash for her to spend how she wishes and we would be $614 ahead.
UW-Madison has no meal plans and it is not required for any dorm residents to eat anything in the dining halls.
Both of my kids’ meal plans come with flex dollars that they will never be able to use, even the 240 lb. (high school) football guy. At the end of the semester, they are planning on buying canned food at the on-campus store and donating it to the food bank.
My kid’s school has flex dollar because all you can eat cafeterias are not close to where the classes are, so many students would tend to eat at a la carte cafeterias in between classes. When my kids were freshmen they used all the flex $$. They also only signed up for 10 meals a week, so I didn’t feel like the money was going to waste.
The menus for the $6k/academic year meal plans looked like cruise ship fare, and the dorms weren’t far off. But for a flagship state university, one gotta wonder.
There’s two or three different issues here:
- Are the prices reasonable for what you get? in the case of the $15k room and board, I think it is reasonable in terms of what you get for what you pay. (not reasonable as a cost to the parent or student :)).
- Are the prices in line with similar caliber schools? I could not help but notice that another of the schools DD is applying to charged near-similar money for your average college food...
- Are there lower cost or tiered options?
There is a current thread about full scholarships and taxes. Grants and scholarships for room and board are taxable, so if one school’s r&b is $5000 more than another, even if it is covered by scholarship and there is no OOP to the student on the tuition bill, there will still be a difference in cost in the end.
I spent less time worrying about the room and board when comparing schools than I should have.
These meal plans seem outrageous, until you remember that tuition can near 40-50K at quite a few schools. At that point, it feels like meal plans cost you only a finger, while tuition is an arm and a leg.
I just saw that my first choice, UChicago, also has a $1,167 “student life fee.” Any idea what that’s funding?
If it’s to pay for things like the “Zombie defense club” the school proudly mentioned giving some money to last year, I’ll be a little concerned to say the least.
My daughter had the most expensive (19 meals a week) meal plan in her first semester; yet she still ate a lot of ramen
Meal plans are a cash cow for many colleges considering the cut they get from the dining services and area businesses taking flex dollars. Also, any flex dollars/meals left unused and expired at the end of each term/year is pure profit for all of them.
Heard off of that from one older friend’s acquaintance who worked as a consultant in the college dining services industry and admitted all of that over a dinner conversation at our friend’s house.
Hey, don’t knock it. It might really be UChicago students’ efforts to prevent students from a certain institution in Evanston from coming in to raid and otherwise force them to be “less nerdy” and more “sporty”. 
My D’s school has unlimited meal plan bundled with dorm room. The cost for the meal plan part is $2073 per semester (~14 weeks) right now. That includes 2 guest meals and some meal dollars for eating outside of dinning halls on campus. So it is roughly $20 per day. Considering 3 meals a day, it is reasonable priced. The food quality varies though. Sometimes it is excellent and near restaurant quality, sometimes it is just typical dorm food.
That’s much cheaper than a freshman 21 meal/week dorm plan even 2 decades ago when I was an undergrad.
When a bunch of my HS friends, college classmates, and their friends at other colleges gathered together on separate occasions during our undergrad years to compare how much our respective campus meal plans cost per meal…the average ranged from a low of $6/meal to a high of ~$10/meal assuming one ate 3 meals/day. And some didn’t have guest meals built in.
For comparison, the meal plans for Berkeley students not living in the associated housing cost about $21 per three-meal day in the campus dining halls, and about $9.30 per day plus 3 hours of work per week at the BSC co-ops.
http://caldining.berkeley.edu/meal-plans/non-resident (about $1 per point, with dining hall meals priced at 6/7/8 points for breakfast/lunch/dinner)
https://www.bsc.coop/food/meal-contract-info-rates (119 days for $1,107 + 51 hours of work)
DS’s plan is about $13 for each of the 12 weekly all-you-can-eat meals plus 300 points per semester. Since he got a lot of free meals in marching band this semester, he has used points to stock up on snack bars. Next semester, he will probably need most of the points for meals to fill out the week.
We got taken to the cleaners DD’s freshman year because she just didn’t eat much as the day-to-day food quality in the highly touted Honors dining hall was not nearly as good as advertised. We got all points for her required sophomore meal plan and she spent them at the on-campus convenience store for snacks, frozen meals, and even quite a few supplies. Of course, all these things would have been a lot cheaper at the Walmart across the street but it was still better than paying for the over-priced dining hall meals.
I like the idea of using the extra points to buy goods for donation. Wish I had thought of that earlier but DS may still have some to spend.
Yes, I’ll have to remember that donation idea. D is likely to have over $400 left over at the end of the school year. If only she could use that money to buy books instead of only food.
Niece told us that at her school, it was not uncommon for students with extra meals on their meal plans to sponsor a client from the women’s shelter, which was 2 blocks from campus. One of the directors at the shelter was also a mid-level administrator at the school, and she had a sign-up list where the students could pick a day and come help someone less fortunate than they were. The clients would come in with a student as their guest, and the students benefitted by helping someone who was down on their luck.
When I was an undergrad at Oberlin, we didn’t have allowances for guest meals.
However, one longstanding tradition we students had was to sneak in people known to be down on their luck so they could have a free meal or few. And though dining staff will deny it, a few did turn a blind eye even when they saw what we did.
Since I still have a little money in a AL state retirement plan due to working for a state University, I get a newsletter which shows a chart where ‘Students Shoulder Greater Share of Tuition’ showing 23.8% in 1988 to 47.5% in 2013 “Tuition accounted for about 48 percent of public higher-education revenue in 2013 - double what it was in 1988”.
Schools are funding things to attract students - and many parents and students have overlooked comparing some of these various costs that are outside of tuition and dorm.
For those that have scholarships, 529 or other funding programs, other savings - great to have your kids higher ed planned. For those that are having to struggle to fund, hope there are commuter options and low cost options.
DD2 is at the state flagship which in some ways is the high cost public option, but she has excellent scholarships that pay full tuition and an extra $2500/year, plus a $500 scholarship which covers her costs in the marching band with a surplus. We are very grateful. We also had savings and a state tuition plan, so she and DD1 both will graduate debt free. Without those extra things in place, we would have needed to liquidate some cash value life insurance policies and other things to fund. Many go to student loan as part of the package up front. People have to figure out their situation and the amount of debt they can tolerate.
College expenses are high! For parents of HS students, do your homework. Whether the costs are in tuition and/or room and board and/or fees … it adds up. The most cost effective path is usually the local community college. Most students would prefer to go away to college, but it is costly. If your kid has high stats, take advantage of this website to look for scholarship tips.