My daughter will be moving to an off campus place and getting off the meal plan. She will be living with a bunch of others and they will have to decide how to divide everything up. My feeling is that this is part of becoming an adult. I will provide her with money for rent and food based on what we would have paid if she stayed on campus and on plan. Not exactly the same amount. There should be some savings because of moving off campus. Then it is her responsibility to figure out how to use it. I’m not going to get too involved in making sure that everything is “fair.” That’s their job. She won’t starve and worse comes to worse we can switch over to a meal plan if things really don’t work out.
Oops, yes on campus. I find many students living off campus live adjacent to campus anyway so accessibility to groceries would often be similar. My kids will bike it or bum a ride with a friend. Many grocery stores also deliver these days for free or a small charge like $5 or less. Even taking an Uber or cab to buy groceries is cheaper than eating on most meal plans.
At my youngest kid’s college, I know he is in a private facebook group where students post for any free food on campus. Most colleges constantly have all kinds of events and gatherings with food on them, often with food leftover after the event. I thought is was a smart way to use social media to avoid food waste and score free meals.
I agree with you @gallentjill. My kids get a monthly budget. How they spend it is up to them. If they make big dinners for friends or go crazy on expensive items and are running low on funds by the end of the month, time to fund some cheap eats. In my college days it was usually ramen and Kraft mac and cheese. My kids are healthier eaters and things like rice, beans, and eggs are really cheap. 
I have a similar philosophy as @gallentjill. I will be giving my sophomore an amount based on dorm/meal plan costs. It is her decision how to budget that money for rent, utilities, and food. Another step closer to actual adulting.
My daughter also didn’t want the dining hall food and moved into an on-campus apartment.
I would make no decisions based on other people (“they will cook”)
Set it up so that he has a monthly budget and leave it to him.
I would agree with the proviso that he cook two nights a week over the summer so he can learn to cook.
He may be able to work it out if the other student plans budget meals and cooks them that they can share the food. But if the other student doesn’t come through your son is on his own.
Also ask how will he get to the super market…mine relied on her apartment mates but there were a few weeks where she had some issues. …but our college has a student rental car program that they can rent by the hour.
When my kids moved off campus I gave them a budget of what I would have paid for on campus. How they spent it was up to them. They never shared cooking or food with their roommates. I think it was because their friends were very particular of what they wanted to eat. D1’s roommate (best friend) used to come out to the kitchen whenever D1 was cooking and said “I am not hungry, just keeping you company,” then would proceed to eat D1’s food. D1 always made more anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. On the other hand, I don’t think I would be so keen on my kid paying for food and having someone else do the cooking. What if their schedules didn’t coincide? I also would not pay for my kid to have a personal cook. It just wouldn’t sit right with me.
Would you be ok if your kid were to hire a student to do his/her laundry in exchange for food/money?
Personally, I wouldn’t get into the details of the situation if there is a kitchen available to them for cooking. I would set him up with second-hand pans and utensils, either from my own duplicates, yards sales or swap shops and determine a monthly budget for both cooking in and a meal or two out each week. Primarily that is what I did for D but she also had the option of dining dollars which I purchased at the beginning of the semester and considered when doing the budget. She bought a crockpot, I loaded her up with essentials like S&P, condiments, boxed rice, some canned goods and then she had at it. This girl cannot boil an egg but after a semester she was getting better…lots of texting about different recipes but she and her roommates had fun experimenting. Wait until you get the phone call about the prices at the market…my D was dumbfounded how much OJ and certain other common foods cost. Was a great laugh for me.
Your son will have to figure this out, but you can help him by teaching him to cook a handful of healthy meals this summer, if he doesn’t cook already. Give him tips on shopping and prep, so that he can have some grab and go meals ready when he has to head out and doesn’t have time to prepare a lunch. Help him with strategies for negotiating food rules (no stealing others’ food; ask about common things like condiments; what guidelines do they have for clean up?–that can be a real problem!) My daughter had a roommate this past year (she’s out of college) who would leave her dishes in the sink for a day or two. Not only was this gross, but it tied up the common dishes so that no one else could use them unless they washed them. The other girl finally moved out. All roommates need to have a standard for how long dishes can sit dirty.
My son is a junior, and has never lived anywhere but a dorm room, yet he has bought increasingly smaller meal plans each year. This year, he’s down to a few meals per week. The rest goes into an account that is accepted by most of the merchants in his college town. He eats a lot better now that he eats in restaurants and we haven’t found it to be that much more expensive. There’s certainly less waste.
Next year, he’ll be in an apartment with three girls (those poor women!) so will have to learn some community cooking. So far, he has mastered caramelized onions for steak. Yeah, we’ve got some work to do this summer.
FYI: Whole Foods delivers, as do other grocery stores for a small fee. My daughter got WF delivered each week her senior year. We were stunned at how much less we spent on her meals than when she was on the full college meal plan. At her school, it was all or nothing and that meal plan was very expensive.
My kids lived off campus. We gave them a budget for food…and didn’t increase it by a dime. We did some research at the time, and for them, $200 a month was plenty for their OWN food.
I will say…both of our kids worked, and they probably spent money in addition to what we gave them.
In addition, we did the first stock up of things like kitchen essentials, toilet paper, dish soap, etc.
For my kid, living in an on-campus apartment meant she had to have a meal plan, but there was a pretty minimal choice for apartment dwellers. Institutional food may not be anyone’s favorite, but if there’s no time to make lunch between classes, that same sandwich every day gets old, too.
That being said, if your son wants off the plan and that’s ok with the school, he’ll be fine. However, I would not be buying into this “my roommate is going to cook for me” stuff. People get busy, have different schedules and mealtimes. Honestly, I just don’t think it’ll happen. And then there’s the issue of who cleans up. If its the kid who has to cook, I can see him not being happy with being the maid. I’d plan for him to be responsible for his own food (and clean up) only. I would give my kid his meal money (by month, by week, lump sum; however you decide) and tell him he can share if he wants, but that’s all the cash he gets. Kitchen equipment is easy. Get some pans, utensils, plates, and silverware at Good Will or any other consignment. And, the best part about used is that when college ends, you can send it back to Good Will and not have to move it.
OP-you know your son’s eating habits.
May be easier for your son to just be separate from the others’ food budget…
He may be on a different schedule and won’t be at the apt for meals…plus no one like to clean up the kitchen…especially the cook who has to plan meals, shop and cook…too much for a student even though it seems doable now…
He will separate himself from the squabbles about the cleaning the kitchen.
Had a roomie who wasn’t picky about the food he ate.
So he ate the same thing for Lunch everyday-2 corn dogs, Dinner-2 hot pockets Breakfast-2 packages of instant oatmeal.
Rest of his diet was fruit, raw vegs, Multivitamin, adult beverages…
Buying the Costco sized packages of his lunch, dinner and breakfast staples he had plenty of money for adult beverages…
He didn’t like to have to waste time on what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Don’t blame him…he happily ate his turkey corn dogs and hot pockets…never tiring of them…
For sure look at rummage sales, second hand stores, garage sales, goodwill and the like for kitchen items.
part of college is for them to become independent. this is one situation that will help him learn.
I see nothing wrong for him. He has to learn to cook sometime — this is how a lot of our kids learned. But I’d give him a budget, and I wouldn’t cover another kid’s food. As a single adult, I spend around $50-60/week at the grocery store, including paper products, shampoo, etc in addition to food. I don’t buy frozen or “box dinners”, and make ~20 meals a week out of that (eat out about once a week).
Also, he needs a plan for regular transport to a real grocery store.
You can send a Prime grocery box too. For about $50, I used to send a lot of basics, t-paper, baggies, snacks I knew my daughter liked, oatmeal, some baking things, toiletries about once a month. Usually I had free shipping because I’d ordered something on Prime and opted to not have 2 day shipping, but otherwise it is $6 bucks or so, and kind of fun to fill the box.
Sharing my own personal experience, I moved a couple of blocks off campus into an apartment with three other guys my 2nd year and we continued to live together until graduation. We all went grocery shopping together once a week and had ‘family’ dinner nights together at least a couple of nights per week depending on our schedules, alternating with 2 of us cooking and 2 cleaning up. Nothing fancy. We were always excited to discover a new kind of Hamburger Helper we hadn’t had yet :-c but it was a great way of decompressing, bonding, and sharing what was going on with each of us. We were not all best friends who did everything together. We were roommates who did some things together, but had different majors, separate friends and interests, so those meals were our time to catch up. Sometimes we’d invite the girls across the courtyard, or they’d invite us. Our windows stared right into each other, so we practically all lived together anyway.
YMMV, but I’d say we ate just as well if not better than on a meal plan while being far less expensive.
My kids (both son and daughter) did not have meal plans after the first year of college and cooked for themselves. In fact, my son had a suite with a kitchen his first year and I wish we could have saved on the overpriced meal plan. For the second year we actually did the math and figured that if he paid cash for meals the total cost of the number of meals in the plan was less than the actual charge for the meal plan. My gift to my son when I dropped him off at college was his favorite appliance – a $20 rice cooker. My son is a great cook and I think he does most of the cooking for his family.
Even if your son paid for all of his roommate’s food as well as his own, the total cost would probably be less than a typical college meal plan – honestly, I could easily have fed a family of 4 with what we were being charged for the full freshman-year plans. So if the exchange is that that one kid cooks for the others in exchange for having his own food subsidized – sounds like a fair exchange. You already ARE paying a premium for someone else to cook for your son.
When I was in college I always had cooking facilities and prepared my own food after first year.
Dorm food is terrible - not just in terms of flavor, but also very hard to stick to a healthy diet. Too much temptation to fill up on carbs & pack on the pounds.
So I think it’s crazy to stay on the meal plan. Even if your son isn’t cooking in a healthy way – he will be buying only food that he likes and wants to eat, rather than paying for the dorm’s ability to serve all sorts of food he doesn’t like and doesn’t want to eat.
If you send money to your son – then you can just give him a lump sum every semester equal to or less than you would have paid for the meal plan … and let him take responsibility for how to allocate it.
I did NOT pay for my kids’ food after their first year — so not only were my kids cooking for themselves in subsequent years, they were also buying the food out of their earnings.
“I could easily have fed a family of 4 with what we were being charged for the full freshman-year plans”
Totally! As I stated previously, it calculated out to $178 a week!! $-)
Mine chose to stay on a limited dining hall plan when she moved into the apartments. She gets 40 meals a semester along with dining dollars. It works out to about 2 meals a week. It’s a good balance for her and affordable for us.
I think it’s fine to let him try it but I have my doubts too… I mean, getting multiple roommates in the same place to eat, or having them come in at random times and hoping food is left of you are the last. One person cooking and others paying, it’s just tricky but then, they may totally not care about any inequity. Just set a good budget for him and hope for the best. There are some good “5 recipe” college cookbooks out there.
@ LeafySeaDragon, Every alarm in my body went off after reading the first post. I was in your son’s position many decades ago. My friends and I got an apartment; one guy had a car & he was going to drive to store weekly to get food. The rest of us were going to cook and clean up. Everything went ok until I realized the main chef never seemed to wash his hands. Even after going to the bathroom. Even after #2. I was back in a dorm and back on a meal plan within 3 weeks. :-&
That’s a bargain. The current cost of a full meal plan at my daughter’s alma mater breaks down to $220/week for 19 meals… or almost $11.60 per meal. (Of course I paid less way back when… but the point is that’s a lot of dollars to work with).
I pay around $90 a week on groceries for myself, cooking for myself only on pretty much an every-day basis.