<p>Anyone figured out what their kid's meal plan costs per meal?</p>
<p>This year DS is a sophomore. He decided to go with a plan that gives him 5 meals per week, and the rest we buy in "flex" dollars. The cost for one semester for the 5 meals/week was $808. If I assume he gets 17 "weeks" of 5 meals, that works out to $9.50/meal. I also saw that the school was selling extra "blocks" of 25 meals for $350, which works out to $14/meal! The freshmen required 20 meal/week plan works out to $13.75/meal.</p>
<p>Are other colleges' meal plans this expensive?</p>
<p>I haven't done the math, but I'm shocked at what room and board costs these days; I've seen upwards of $10,000/year (that's a 30-week year, not a 52-week year).</p>
<p>Don't even bother - it will make you want to puke. Colleges hold this over your head requiring you to pay for meals that you will never comsume.<br>
A rip off- I say!</p>
<p>Yes, my daughter's room and board is close to $10,000. Yes her suite is nice - w-w carpet, air-conditioned etc. but......</p>
<p>My S figured out (years ago, it's higher now) that we were paying 11 dollars a meal, for not very many meals. Luckily, we didn't have to take the meal plan, so after his frosh year, we gave him the money instead. Even buying from local restaurants often instead of cooking, he came out ahead.</p>
<p>UCLA obfuscates the cost of the meals by bundling it with the housing costs but by using the non-resident 11 meal per week rate (the smallest allowed for residents), it works out to about $8.90 per meal. The cost per meal goes down if one has more meals per week but my D doesn't even use her 11 most of the time. </p>
<p>Her room/board will be about $14,657 this next year (lowest meal plan but she'll be in a single). I know LA's expensive, especially in the area of UCLA, but the res halls are built on the free public land that's part of UCLA so the charge is way high. I'm sure UCLA must be making a tidy profit on the housing/board charges.</p>
<p>Room alone for an upperclass single is $6000 a semester; if you want to stay for January term or leave for break late or arrive from break early, they will charge you more. Convinced me to let my soph move off campus
But meal plan meals in the all-you-can-eat dining hall are ~$6 each; outsiders pay ~$9. At the a la carte places you get a $5.75 value, over that pay the difference or use a second $5.75 meal. The good thing is you get a dollar value for the semester so you don't lose 'meals' at the end of the week.</p>
<p>Full meal plan (2.5 meals/day, 7 days a week) is over $5,000/year at my kids' college. A bargain at $9/meal, $22.11/day. It's a lot more expensive/meal if you buy a cheaper plan. Glad I'm not paying it anymore. I think we budget $85/week for food, and they do fine. They do cook for themselves, mainly, and some of their entertainment budget goes for eating out, too.</p>
<p>When there was a cafeteria (bulk dining), the food costs were fairly well known because, everybody ate at the cafeteria, because there was no choice. </p>
<p>Now that there is a choice, boutique cafes, you have inefficiencies that must be made up in subsidies. </p>
<p>Parents have given in to their childrens's desires. Choice wins.</p>
<p>Nope. The prices I gave are for traditional dining halls with limited choice at any particular meal. It's purely a function of legal employment (how many legal employees do you think your normal, non-national-chain cheap restaurant has?), the value of time, the time-value of money, and the fact that most foodservice operations have been outsourced to companies that know how to squeeze out a marginal buck.</p>
<p>I think when my daughter swipes in for a meal (all you can eat) it's about $10. She does that for her main meal each day, and usually picks up a bagel or a yogurt for breakfast or lunch using flex dollars. Room and board for the academic year runs about $8,400.</p>
<p>S stays off campus and picks up about 1 meal a day, all you can eat. Breakfast $4.10, lunch $5.10, dinner $6.05. Not too bad. He usually eats samdwiches or cereal for brunch, then hits the caf for dinner. An added little bonus, he has a lot of friends that are on meal plans where they get 5 guest meals a semester. Many are giving him the coupons. His old school (he transferred this year) was about $1500 a semester for unlimited meal plan, 19 meals and Sunday night midnight snack.</p>
<p>Now that he's off campus and not required to have an "all access 7 day plan", we did the math on the meal plan: $6.54 per meal. Individual meals cost $6.50 for lunch and $7.15 for dinner, so it made more sense to allocate the cash directly to S. We give him the equivalent cash for the monthly plan; he should be able to eat much more cheaply, with careful shopping and sharing some meals with his roommates, even if he occasionally buys a meal on campus.</p>
<p>For my daughter, lunch is $3.90 and dinner is $4.28, all you can eat. I forget what breakfast is - $3.50? - because she never actually goes to breakfast. You get enough dining dollars that you would pretty much have to eat two meals a day to use it up. Because she occasionally skips meals, she has extra dining dollars to spend in the little grocery stores on campus. It is a good deal. (University of Texas at Austin)</p>
<p>$1550/semester=== includes UNLIMITED ACCESS to the major dining halls plus $100 of dining dollars which can be spent at any of the other on campus eateries (coffee house, snack bars, etc.). It also includes a number of guest passes. Actually, I can't even feed my kid at home for this price!!</p>
<p>Last spring I overheard my S and his buddy debating their meal plan options. Buddy insisted he could buy food for less than meal plan while S had two points;
1. Cost of the food, yes, but factoring in kitchen cost plus shopping, storage, prep, cooking, clean-up, waste and time makes it's a different deal.
2. Someone has to pay for the dining hall building, kitchen facilities staff, plates, forks, knives, water and sewer costs, the guy who hauls the garbage, the person who washes the windows, the folks who made the paint on the walls, etc. S offered that he'd feel better knowing that his meal ticket contributes to more than food.
I bet you can tell he was taking hs econ last spring.</p>
<p>$1550/semester for 19(all you can eat) meals per week + $150 flex spending. This is the most expensive plan at S's sch. but we went for it for the first semester just to ensure he had plenty of meals (ex-high sch.football lineman). We can adjust down next semester if 19 turns out to be more than he uses.</p>
<p>Wanna hear the bad part? The cafeteria in his residence hall area closed for the summer for renovations and has yet to re-open! He has been there for two and half weeks. There is another cafeteria on campus but this is a big state univ. so it is not a short or convenient walk for those who don't live in that area. He is able to swipe his card at other eateries on campus (Chik-Fil-a, etc) for meal equivalencies but almost always ends up having to use some of the flex money to cover extra cost. </p>
<p>The univ. cannot give a date for the dining hall to re-open but reminds us there is another dining hall on campus (their way of saying they will not be refunding any of our $$ spent on meal plans)</p>
<p>So right now we are getting very little of our $ worth with the meal plan...arrgghh.</p>