@alooknac , MHC does not have a good explanation, although they do acknowledge that there’s a problem, particularly for first year students.
From what I’ve observed, the main problem isn’t that the students have schedules that are too full. If that were the case, there would be available shifts because I’ve never heard of an MHC student skipping class to work. However, dining hall hours at MHC are not long, and in many cases they do overlap classes. In my daughter’s case, she’s a varsity athlete, and her practice hours last semester were every day almost exactly at dinner time, with about 20 minutes at the end where she could squeeze in a meal for herself. So part of her issue was that she wasn’t available during dinnertime on weekdays. However, she had tons of other availability throughout the week.
The answer to another of your questions is no, they are not good about telling students they can work elsewhere – quite the opposite; they just tell the kids they’re required to work in the dining hall and never mention it’s okay to work elsewhere on campus (not that first-years can realistically get other jobs, if you see @19171998biology 's post above).
However, in my opinion, students not being made aware that they can work elsewhere for work study, while a problem, isn’t actually making things worse. You can see above that some kids are already looking for jobs elsewhere and the jobs are hard to get anyway, so if more kids were looking for them the market would be squeezed even more tightly.
I don’t think it’s fair to say to the kids that if they opt to take the labs required for their majors or participate in varsity sports it’s just an opportunity cost and they need to suck it up because it’s their choice. Despite having the desire to work and plenty of free time during dining hall hours even with her class and team practice schedule, my daughter can’t get hours.