I don’t think its that challenging to get housemates together for a dinner several times per week. Friends go to the dining hall together and meet up there as well. Not to different, IMO. My kids and their friends have easily made it work.
@calmom That was about 5 years ago with my first kiddo. I’m sure it is higher now.
At my oldest son’s school, the savings of buying plan vs paying out of pocket each meal at the same dining hall was 25 cents a meal. Not worth the plan for us. He’d rather have freedom to eat at other places or cook. Saved quite a bit.
As for roommate whose family does not provide money, well, that is my oldest as well. He covers his own expenses with a mix of scholarships, loan, and summer earnings. Just because OPs son’s roommate doesn’t have family financial support, doesn’t mean OPs son must pay for roommate.
OP, this is one time where you need to let go and let them figure it out. Even though, compared to ds2’s cost per meal, $8.62 is a bargain, I bet he can eat healthier and cheaper than that. Ds2 certainly did. We weaned ds off, going from a full meal plan to a partial and dining dollars to just some dining dollars as a supplement to his food budget. His senior year he worked as a host at a fancy restaurant and got some food free there. 
Everyone will have their first experiences living with others and cooking/shopping/clean-up experiences. From my experience with my daughters it is really important for those roommates to have a planning meeting the very beginning of school. There are supplies to be gotten and shared, not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes cooking/preparing a meal. There is a difference between making a sandwich and opening a bag of chips to go with that or preparing a dinner, there is a difference when one roommate expects everyone to shop for organic cage-free eggs, etc and others are content with canned vegetables, if sharing staples, what is included in those staples, hard to shop all together so someone usually is the one assigned to do that and so on and so on.
To distract you, I’d suggest going to Youtube and checking out “Intermarché #lamourlamour”
I love that ad! So clever.
Do any of y’all have boys? =)) In my experience, there is not that much thought put into this. But they won’t starve. It’ll be fine.
^watch the video I promise you’ll like it 
Really … it’s not that big of a deal. Because I started college at age 16, I was 17 the summer I moved into an apartment near my campus. (I didn’t go home because I was at an OOS public and wanted to establish residency … which was actually possible back in the day). I didn’t know anything about cooking… we figured it out No one starved. And that was back in ancient times before apartments came with microwaves.
A bunch of guys living together will probably do all sorts of things in the kitchen their moms would never approve of, from culinary choices and techniques to dishwashing practices or lack thereof, to the sheer number of empty beer bottles that will become the primary apartment decor… but they will survive. Maybe their kitchen staples will be canned tuna, ramen noodle, and boxed mac & cheese… but they will survive.
The person who purchased the bulk of kitchen equipment will be the one who owns it when others move out. But I think that’s also a thing that the student should determine within their own budget, whether that comes from student earnngs or a specific lump sum from the parents.
And every single college I have ever heard of lets students buy back into the meal plan if they want, either at a pro-rate or by purchasing dining dollars or meal points or whatever the college calls its flex meal spending options. So if October rolls around and the kid starts craving those dining hall meals… that’s a problem that can be fixed then.
The thing that really irked me when my kids were first year students and on mandatory meal plans is knowing that I had paid through the nose for pricey plans and that the kids were not eathing what had been purchased. My son had a suite with a kitchen and his LAC had only a single dining hall plus a snack bar with very limited hours. My son slept through breakfast and regularly missed lunch & dinner because he didn’t manage to get there on time… so back to the trusty rice cooker in his apartment, or ordering takeout to be delivered to the campus. My daughter’s college had somewhat more options but ran into similar problems when her class schedule her first semester made it very difficult for her to get lunch or dinner several days a week within the hours that the main dining halls provided meal service— so very frustrating because we had paid for meals that she wanted to eat – but between a late afternoon and early evening class two days a week there simply was no opportunity for her to get the meals.
I went off the meal plan senior year with my ex husband (we weren’t married at the time, but lived in the same suite). I can’t say I missed the food, because we went out to eat a lot. (We asked our parents for the same amount of $$ they would have spent on the meal plan - his mom was fine with it, my parents, understandably, took some more convincing, as they thought we were going to budget and do a lot of our own cooking, etc.) I think if it wasn’t the case that I was in a relationship with the person I was off the meal plan with, and if I weren’t living in a suite with 5 other people, I might have missed the social aspect of going to the dining hall for meals. Sophomore year seems kind of early to me to go off the meal plan, but you know your son. Will he be able to balance the responsibility of shopping and cooking with his studies? And what if the other kids don’t pull their weight?
Boys can cook, too. And well. Just saying…
My son (long out of college) now lives on Life Cereal, turkey sandwiches and pizza. Oh and multi-vitamins. He went off the meal plan junior year when he moved off campus, but we gave him approximately the money we would have spent on a meal plan while he was in college. I have no idea what he did, but he is not obese and he did not starve.
Amusingly my kid who was happy to stay on the meal plan, is the one who actually likes to cook.
I still miss my eating group from my days as a Caltech groupie. We had fabulous meals. “Dessert is expected but not required.” was our motto. There were ten of us in our eating group and we ate together 5 nights a week, so you only had to cook every other week. I’d love to still be able to do that.
That video was great! How did you even know about it?
I took a cooking class in HS. i )* That got me experimenting in the kitchen at home, and by the time I entered college, I was a pretty good cook and was able to cook for dates. Scored some points there while also saving $. 
I prioritized teaching my children to cook. So many young adults go broke over dining out while they are working full time and others have significant weight problems. Many never learned to prepare and eat a healthy diet.
Doing their own laundry at home would have caused arguments over sharing the washer and dryer. The easy instructions are on the inside of every washer cover. Their definition of deep cleaning is never acceptable to me. Cooking is a honed skill, a stress reliever and a terrific family activity.
If my sophomore daughter can make a 3 tiered cake decorated in fondant in her small suite kitchen, hop in an Uber with two friends each holding a layer, arrive at the rented restaurant and assemble the cake, anything is possible in a small college suite or apartment kitchen!
With college meal plans costing $170/week, bargain and used kitchen essentials and spices will pay off after week 2. When you visit stock his freezer. Frozen meatballs, pork tenderloin, turkey tenderloin are easy to cook and on the wish list. You may laugh at the passive aggressive attempts to prod roommates into cleaning their dishes while everyone figures out a workable system.
My son will be a junior next year and plans to live with his 3 roommates in an on campus house. Thanks for all of the tips. He cannot kick a thing. Going to do some cooking lessons this summer, give him a budget and dig through my post and pans. for duplicates. I think we will save a lot of money on room and Board this year by going this route.
I would give him a budget for food and let him work it out. I got kitchen supplies via Goodwill and garage sales for almost nothing and I’d have no problem outfitting a kitchen because that stuff could follow him. Find some way to mark that stuff. That said, I would warn him he will need to be responsible for his own cooking sometimes and he is not responsible for the food for the other student. He can choose to share, but he has to stay within his budget.
My younger son always cooked at home, and after the mandatory year on the meal plan, he went to the minimum for lunch/snack bar and cooked his own meals. Saved us $3000/year. He’d also cook dinners for his friends. He took a bunch of our old cookware, and I got him some good knives for his birthday. His college had areas set aside for free cycling. He acquired some really nice gear that way because his hallmates didn’t want to haul it home. I didn’t want to know about the cleaning up part.
He’s gone from big boy to adult. Time flies, doesn’t it? Just let him make an adult decision and plan for a contingency just in case. Chances are, he’ll come back and say, “This arrangement SUCKS! I want back on the meal plan!”
Let him go! He’s not going to starve and hopefully will just learn to be that much more self-sufficient.
A pot, a frying pan, a spatula and a spoon plus a decent knife are about all you need to create a decent meal cookware-wise. And a decent microwaveable dish. Everything else can be added on an “as-needed” basis.
Paper plates go a long way towards easy clean-up…
My son never had a meal plan even in the freshman dorm which had limited cooking facilities.
He made a lot of friends just on knowing basics!
Honestly he could eat out anywhere for the majority of the time for much less money than a meal plan.
A small frig and a microwave can cover a lot.
Son was a pretty good cook in college (and a great one now).
Hi all - thank you so much for the words of wisdom! I read some of the comments to my son to give him an idea of what he might be facing. As it turns out, the kid who doesn’t get any $$ from his parents get a full meal plan in his financial aid package. So when my son said he will cook, apparently he meant the few meals that he eats in the apartment with the others, he will cook rather than pay into the community pot. I am trying to raise an adult, so I am backing off and letting him figure it out. As long as it doesn’t cost us more it’s fine. Letting go is hard