Every Saturday, I check my Commodore card and I am amazed by how much rollover money has been added. $36.12, $39.13, $30.10. The numbers keep adding up, and although more rollover money seems like a good thing, I can’t help but think about the $4.24 that my mother loses every time I miss a meal. Clearly, it would be a much better deal for me to use the seven meal-plan, or even the fourteen, so that I wouldn’t be paying for unused meals. But because I’m a freshman, I don’t have a choice, and I won’t have a choice for another two and a half years, now that an eight meal-plan will be initiated for juniors.
When I spoke with Frank Gladu, the acting director of Vanderbilt Dining, it became clear how complex Dining is, a department constantly balancing how to serve students while also balancing the budget. The requirement for underclassmen “is an essential piece to ensure that there is enough revenue to support the food service outlets on campus,” Gladu told me. The underclassman requirements are a way to make money. But as Gladu explained, the answer became more intricate.
Expanding on the community element, Gladu cited the freshman nineteen meal-plan, adding that “it really goes back to our first year students having the most complete community experience as possible.” Vanderbilt is a school, and students are supposed to support each other and build a community together. This is one of the aims of the Commons, and it’s been a part of Vanderbilt Dining for a while. Sitting at a table with people you barely know and making friends, or running into your hallmates and striking up a conversation is facilitated by the fact that most freshman eat on campus because they’ve already paid for those meals.
Furthermore, without the meal plan requirements, people who do use the meal plan would have fewer eating options. Because of the requirements, Dining sells fifty thousand meals per week just to underclassmen. Although the price of food ($3.01) is refunded when people do not use their meal, the remaining $4.24 helps to support the infrastructure, the “labor costs, management, electricity bills, cleaning, trash collection, all these expenses that go into what the total expense of your meal plan is,” according to Gladu, so that even when you don’t use a meal, Dining is getting support to run itself.
Because freshmen and sophomores don’t have any choice in the number meals they buy, every Vanderbilt student has more choices in where they can eat, on campus and off (with Taste of Nashville). In some ways, it’s the ultimate example of community, because we are all paying a certain amount, even if we’d rather pay less, to support each other.
Although that may be ringing socialism alarm bells for some, the fact remains that students still do have a choice of where they eat. For example, I could eat at Ruth’s Chris or McDonald’s every day if I wanted to; I would just be paying for a meal off-campus that I had already paid for on-campus. If I am willing to lose that money, I’m allowed to - it’s my prerogative. So, the meal plan requirements do not really eliminate choice of where and how often you eat, they just make it more expensive to do so off campus, because you pay for your meal plan and your meal. Plus, they are expanding the choices on campus, so that people who cannot afford to (or don’t want to) eat off campus have a lot more choices than they would without the requirement.
Although it may not seem like it sometimes—the endless barrage of Quizno’s, C.T. West, Ro*Tiki, Rand, the Commons, the Pub, and Grins gets monotonous—we really do have a lot of options in where we eat on campus. Think about it: it could just be Rand. Really, the Dining requirements are the price we pay in order to have more choices on campus.
So I decide not to get my money’s worth…that’s my choice, and I guess it’s worth it that everybody else gets more choices while I lose $50 a week. I’ll just think of it as a charitable donation to Vanderbilt Dining.
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