<p>The risk of fire in dorm rooms is very scary…especially in large dorm structures. My D’s school doesn’t allow microwaves or any type of cooking appliances in the rooms, other than coffeemakers. Coffeemakers are only allowed if they have the auto shut-off feature and the RAs do check for that. Yet, nearly every year, a few kids manage to set fire to their rooms by smuggling in a banned appliance, despite having several fully equipped kitchens available on every floor. It scares the daylights out of me but D just complains about the weird cooking smells emanating from some of the rooms and has a few friends who won’t sleep in their own room because of their roomie’s smelly food! Weird, but true…</p>
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<p>At my state undergrad college, the residence life/university food service was a self-supporting entity within the school, and the dining halls were funded through bonds. The bonding agency that issued the bonds required the university to have all students purchase a meal plan in order to guarantee a stable funding source to pay off the bonds.</p>
<p>So yes, they are a revenue generating resource at my college. They school didn’t profit from the meal plans but the money did pay for the dining hall facility, cooking equipment, and staff to support it.</p>
<p>As gadad indicated the motivation for compulsory dining plan is always economics. The overhead of campus dining hall is such that you need a high level of participation top make it pay for itself. On the other hand, these plans seldom offer the best quality food or the best value for money. At most universities, campus dining is provided through a for-profit contractor that has little incentive to offer a varied or high quality diet to students. It is often the same groups that supply airline food. With an average expense of between $2 and $3 per meal per student, you get what you pay for. Unless you take every meal on the plan, which nobody does, the average cost per meal to the student ends up much higher than a pay as you go or cook-it yourself option. </p>
<p>When given the choice, most students will opt out of compulsory dining plans for more flexible and often much healthier options. As a freshman at MIT, our eldest D had the choice between residential dining in her dorm under a discounted pay-as-you go plan with a number of healthy options including vegetarian, low fat or low carb, to fully equipped kitchens and any number of specialty food courts. The total cost per semester was less than half that of our youngest Ds meal plan who ends spending extra cash on outside options to get some variety and to avoid gaining 5 lbs per semester.</p>