I’m a senior in high school that keeps kosher. If anyone else out here does, would you please tell me which school you go to and how the kosher food is? I’m applying to the following schools, but feel free to post if it’s another school because I think I’m going to add one school to my list.
CUNY Queens, SUNY Binghamton, Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Wesleyan, Williams, Brown, Yale, Harvard
I’m thinking of adding:U of Rochester or F&M
Thank you!
You can check some of the Hillel pages for those schools, but I’m not sure all of them even have kosher dining plans.
Schools that use Bon Appetit as their meal provider serve fresh cooked Kosher meals. I can’t imagine they have a Rabbi on staff but they label the offerings as Kosher. I’m just a parent so I’ve only eaten in the dining hall maybe 3 times this year at drop off and on family weekend (they had a different provider last year) but the food was really good and the various items I see on the menu I get emailed weekly look great. Brown and Wesleyan use them so check out their menus. My son just eats at the Halal, Kosher, and vegetarian stations on his campus because that is his comfort level in terms of being Kosher enough for him. He doesn’t eat the soups, pasta casseroles, pizza, etc because they serve a lot of pork items but some of his friends do that are Reform they just check menus for ingredients. They seem to interchangeably serve pork sausage and turkey sausage in some dishes so it can be confusing for those who don’t keep strictly Kosher. Like 1 week they will have bean soup with turkey sausage and 2 weeks later same soup just with pork sausage.
It’s great at Binghamton. There’s a “kosher korner” station in the dining hall that has a good variety every lunch and dinner. Lunch is dairy, dinner is meat. Common dinners are hotdog/hamburgers, chinese food, pot pie, chicken wings, Polish sausage, etc. There’s also a ton of food you can get through Chabad - they have a pizza cafe and also a deli on premises. Also, there is a vegan station at another dining hall that my friend got them to kasher, so that’s also an option if you’re comfortable with it.
you should consider brandeis
If I remember correctly from the tour we took a few years ago, Muhlenberg has a sizeable Jewish population and kosher dining options. May be worth looking into.
@fretfulmother all do with the exception of Williams, but it says on their website that “it’s easy to keep kosher”. They have kosher sandwiches and a kosher kitchen, so I suppose I’d be allowed to use it…
Mount Holyoke currently has a kosher dining hall, Wilder, which is certainly one of the nicer dining halls on campus. They have meat days and dairy days. That said, I imagine the food might get a bit repetitive, and if you need extended hours for one reason or another you’re out of luck (depending on how strictly you keep kosher, though, you might be OK with some of the vegetarian options at Blanchard). One of the kitchen at the Eliot house is kosher year-round and goes full kosher for Passover every year, and I think students who need to use it are allowed to.
Keep in mind that Mt Holyoke is centralizing its dining soon; the Kosher area is supposed to be within the new facility (“superBlanch”). I’m not sure how that will work. You can ask Dining Services about how they plan to handle the transition.
Brandeis would be a good option.
@hf1234 @Qwerty568 Thanks for the suggestion 
Originally I was, but they’re not need blind.
Brandeis is need blind… they give very good financial aid
I attend Columbia, and since Orthodox Jewish students at Barnard and Columbia primarily use the same dining hall (it’s called Hewitt), I thought I’d let you know about my experience with kosher food at Columbia. Hewitt is technically Barnard’s dining hall, but Columbia students are allowed to use it as well. Hewitt serves kosher breakfast, lunch, and dinner every weekday plus Sunday. There’s also a Shabbat Meals at Hewitt group on campus that ensures there’s kosher meals in Hewitt on Friday night and Shabbos day (although upperclassmen usually host meals in their dorm rooms on Shabbos and invite lots of people, so you probably wouldn’t need Hewitt for every Shabbos).
The kosher food is separate from the rest of the food in the dining hall. The kosher area has its own pretty big spot, with one side for milchigs and one side for fleishigs. There’s always a mashgiach on hand. The variety of meal plans is also pretty great - I’m on a 150 meal per semester plan, but there’s options for more (like for 19 meals a week) and less (lots of options for less - I could point you to them if you want to know). There’s always lots of variety of food for each meal as well. Like yesterday for lunch they served honey BBQ salmon, stuffed shells, pizza, Morningstar fake burgers, vegetables, and rice, and they always have bagels, soup, and a salad bar. There’s also always fruit in the non-kosher side that’s also fine since they’re unsliced, such as green apples, red apples, oranges, and bananas. For drinks, there’s always plastic cups to use instead of the stuff washed with the treif dishes and all. The dining hall is also all you can eat - once you swipe in, you can take however much food you want.
There’s also two other options on campus - Cafe Nana in the Hillel building (which is more Israeli food plus pizza) and the John Jay dining hall (which serves prepackaged food by a company called Fresko). But mainly, Hewitt is the place to be. There’s also a ton of restaurants just a subway ride away.