<p>*Quote:
Personally I was happy to go to a school where everyone is forced to have a full meal plan and there’s plenty of socializing in the dining halls because everyone is eating together.
*</p>
<p>While I think that’s a fine idea, and probably works out VERY well if the school is in a rural area with few off-campus alternatives. But, even when students are forced to have big meal plans, if there are off-campus alternatives, those with a few dollars in their pockets will still wander off to those…especially on weekends. </p>
<p>Angel…sounds like you’ll be at UCharleston. Great location…waaayyy too many places for kids to wander to and eat. I would figure out a balanced way to have enough meals to eat at least once a day on campus (maybe 5-10 a week) and then have enough cash for off-campus eating on weekends (beginning Friday night).</p>
<p>What are your Dining Dollar options per semester? If you’re the type to meet friends in Starbucks for homework, study sessions, or relaxation, you’ll want a decent amount of DD.</p>
<p>If you’re a “yogurt in the morning is more than enough for me” kind of kid, then don’t bother planning on eating breakfast in the dining hall.</p>
<p>I don’t know how other schools calculate meals, but my kids’ undergrad has some formula like…$7 for breakfast, $8 for lunch, and $9 for dinner…and that was used to price their meal plans. So a kid who eats very lightly for breakfast doesn’t need to be paying $7 for a carton of yogurt or bowl of cereal. lol</p>
<p>Mom2collegekids:
Here are the options available…</p>
<p>15 Meals per week PLUS! Plan: This plan provides 15 guaranteed meals per week. Plus you have $100 Dining Dollars per semester. ($1,675)</p>
<p>10 Meals per week PLUS! Plan: This plan provides 10 guaranteed meals per week. Plus you have $175 Dining Dollars per semester. ($1,625)</p>
<p>200 Meals PLUS! Block Plan: Use your 200 block meals anytime during the semester. Plus you have $50 Dining Dollars per semester. ($1,675)</p>
<p>175 Meals PLUS! Block Plan: Use your 175 block meals anytime during the semester. Plus you have $100 Dining Dollars per semester. ($1,625)</p>
<p>Yeah, I know there are tons of places to go eat. For Breakfast, I tend to eat medium… yogurt isn’t enough but cereal can be? I don’t know if DD is usable at Starbucks… hm. As for monetary value, I have no clue! I’m leaning toward 200 block meals or 175 block meals… but the ten meals per week may be pretty good too? or 15? They have more DD.</p>
<p>For a college student, three meals a day usually means lunch, dinner, and a bunch of food eaten late at night. The last of these meals doesn’t fit into the meal plan. I would go with the 10 meals pwer week PLUS plan. Remember, in all likelihood those Dining Dollars can be spent in the dining halls as well as at other locations, so what does the student have to lose?</p>
<p>My kid has a comprehensive fee and so there’s never been any kind of meal plan to consider or not. And I agree, this does work better for a boy than perhaps a girl. But because of this, I am completely struggling with the meal plan options. I guess the thing to do is plan for lunch and dinner with lots of flex dollars (or whatever the school calls them) so you can pick and choose. At S’s school (with no swiping and unlimited entry and meals for that matter), he barely spends any money on food off campus, mostly because he sees the food as “free.” And it’s good. Or good enough. Friends with kids at Boston College said that everything is kind of ala carte there? So the kids try to get the biggest bang for their buck, but that usually ends up being not always healthy options. And another friend at NYU said any kind of meal plan seemed worthless because the dining halls were out of way for her S and there was just too much good food in NY for him to pass up!</p>
<p>My thing is, unless you know what the options are OUTSIDE of the food plan, I think as incoming freshman it’s really hard to know what’s what or what you’ll end up doing in practice vs theory. Last year, S never ate breakfast. This year he tries to make it when he can because sometimes he ends up missing lunch and the dining hall is closed from 2-4.</p>
<p>At least for my, my freshman year meal plan was I think 12 meals a week? 7 dinner swipes and 5 breakfast swipes. Including these, we got $330 for additional money to use per semester, in food points. For me though, I definitely spent more than $330 per semester on food. Thus, I would recommend you look into plans that have more food points and less swipes for your meals, to get more flexibility in your dining options.</p>
The 15 meal plan gives you 80 more meals for $125 ($50 extra, $75 less in Dining Dollars), or about $1.50/meal. Clearly the school is expecting you to use closer to 10 meals per week regardless of the plan you are on.</p>
<p>Really, the price difference between all these plans is so small it barely registers. I would go with either the 15 meal/week or 200 meal block plan. 10 meals/week means you are on your own for 60+ meals in the semester, the extra $125 gives you $2/meal, that isn’t going to cut it.</p>
<p>You should look at the blog for the college. That is how we decided the best plan for my son. We ended up with 12 meals a week and flex dollars. You can also add dollars aa needed. My son rarely eats breakfast and rarely even spends the 12 meals each week. The flex allows him to eat wherever which he prefers.</p>
<p>Figuring out XX meals per week and YY dollars requires some advanced calculus to figure out. DD1 started with 8 meals / week and $300 and we had plenty of left over swipes which we used when the family visited her every few weeks (some dining options are pretty tasty!). </p>
<p>This semester she’s in the 5/week and $300. Being an architecture student Starbucks is the only food group she needs, with the occasional chain fast food at the student center.</p>
<p>To fully understand what you’re paying for, look at the cost per swipe. We’re paying some $1100/semester for 5+300, and that’s astronomically high. At the end she’s getting an apartment across campus and food cost was the primary issue (not quality, quality is excellent) but the cost per swipe is substantial.</p>
<p>My school was $11 per swipe, and I really only ate in the cafeteria my freshman year (2005-2006) so it’s probably gone up since then. Huge waste for a bowl of cereal, and even most of the things that I tended to eat for dinner (sandwich, bowl of spaghetti, slice of pizza) would have been cheaper to just pay cash for elsewhere. I personally just did not like the dining hall food, and as a vegetarian, I got sick of their veggie options really quickly and felt like I had to struggle to eat meals with enough nutrition (not something I ever have a problem with cooking for myself). Obviously that’s really dependent on the individual’s eating habits and the quality of the cafeteria, though. I personally was thrilled when I could cook for myself and preferred to eat out than at the cafeteria.</p>
<p>Frankly, I wish it were the way it was when I was in the dorms, back in the dark ages. Our housing covered all of our meals and we didn’t have to worry about which plan to get. It was just assumed that we would eat 3 meals a day in the cafeteria. Of course, this was also back in the day when the student union had only one cafeteria, and there wasn’t every type of fast food you could imagine available.</p>
<p>And, of course, by eating 3 meals a day in the cafeteria I picked up the dreaded 15! </p>
<p>We got our S the highest meal plan and had to beg him to use it. The college would not let you reduce the meal plan, but you could up it. So, looking back, we probably should have gone with the middle meal plan choice first, then taken a look at how it was being used and adjusted agter the first quarter.</p>
That’s another issue with some of these meal plans. Students may find eating there a little too convenient, feel that they need to use up all their meal plan points, and eat too much of the unhealthy food there. I think sometimes parents are trying to push the bigger meal plans too hard. I think at the end of the day the student isn’t going to starve so starting smaller and working up from there makes more sense for a relatively lighter eater.</p>
<p>10 Meals per week PLUS! Plan: This plan provides 10 guaranteed meals per week. Plus you have $175 Dining Dollars per semester. ($1,625)</p>
<p>I think this is the one to choose. Assuming that you won’t be eating in a dining hall on a Friday night (since many kids don’t do that), that gives you 9 meals to eat during the school week and 1 meal over the weekend to eat in the Dining Hall (maybe Sat lunch or Sunday dinner). </p>
<p>The $175/ semester in DD nicely supplements any holes in the meal plan. It gives you about 22 purchased meals of about $8…or looking at it from another way…about 11 purchases meals for about $8 and 16 snack/drink purchases for about $4. That sounds about right for a semester of about 16 weeks. I’m guessing that the DD money is spent at 3rd party dining venues on campus (Starbucks, Burger King, etc) and vending machines?</p>
<p>Plus, the $50 per semester price difference can be used like extra Dining Dollars. </p>
<p>Tip…keep a box of bottled water in your dorm. MUCH cheaper than paying $1.50 from a vending machine or wherever.</p>
<p>SAVE with Your Cougar Card:
Breakfast $6.00
Lunch $8.75
Dinner $9.00"</p>
<p>The cafeteria also “features unlimited second-helpings at every meal”.</p>
<p>I like the 10 meals as well. I’m still iffy about meals though due to time restrictions, but if I have a lot of DD, then I can grab a snack instead of a meal… so I may do that… it sounds more filling then 200 meals. We’ll see!</p>
<p>DD are used at other on campus eateries, not “fast food” or Starbucks… here are the DD locations… Chick-Fil-A, Quiznos, The Greenhouse, Joe Mole = at the student center. The Hungry Cougar which has a deli, garden bar, pizza bar. Einstein Bros. Bagels has breakfast foods and sandwiches. Then, Java City has coffee, etc. So, no using DD at Starbucks. Meals are only used at the main cafeteria, and DD is used elsewhere so I think more DD is best… can get a coffee and pastry… or a sandwich and tea… I think I’m sold on 10 meals.</p>
<p>Also about meals… in case anyone was wondering…
“Q: Can I swipe my ‘meals’ multiple times a day?
A: With Block Plans, you can swipe as many times and at any time throughout the day. You can also swipe a friend or family member with your block meals!
Meals per Week Plans allow you to swipe up to three meals per day, one per meal period. The meal periods are as follows:
Breakfast: Location opening - 10:59am
Lunch: 11:00am - 3:59pm
Dinner: 4:00pm - Location closing”</p>
<p>It sounds like your school plans are very different than my D’s but I’ll try to give you some advice based on what we learned. From recommendations here on CC, she went with the minimum a freshman could buy: 7 meals/week (105 total) which came with $670 dining dollars. At her school, only dinners and weekend brunch count as meals; breakfast and lunch are a la carte. We have found that the dining dollars do not go as far as you think they will. D never eats breakfast but still went through all her dining dollars last semester and had to purchase more. She used up close to all her meals but is not using them as fast this semester (63 left still with 6 wks to go). She also goes to school in a city (San Diego) and they do go out on weekends.</p>
<p>With 10 meals a week, you may find you go through the $175 dining dollars much faster than you’d think. Make sure you can add them. I was surprised at how much it really costs to eat at college these days. Yes, some of it is choice. Just be sure to discuss this thoroughly with your parents so you know what the expectations are.</p>
<p>^ Yeah. I think I’m going to go with 15 meals/ week + 100 DD or 200 block meals + 50 DD. Probably the earlier. With 15 meals, I can eat some days three times and some on the weekend. It also has more DD then the 200 block meal plan…</p>