Let's take a look at some meal plan math to find out. I added up the total amount of meal opportunities students had for the fall and spring semesters of last year (279 for the fall, 281 for spring). Without a plan, breakfast in the dining hall costs $7.85, brunch and lunch cost $9.60, and dinner is $13.60. The unlimited plan costs $2,600 per semester. Meal plans treat a meal as a meal, whether it is breakfast, lunch, or dinner. If you swipe in without a meal plan and "pay as you go," however, there is a price difference between breakfast, brunch or lunch, and dinner. So if you skip meals throughout the semester, the type of meal skipped affects your total cost. If you eat every meal at the dining hall, then a meal plan is the most economical choice, since the sum of the individual meal swipes is greater than the cost of the unlimited meal plan.
But keep in mind this assumes that you will eat every meal at the dining hall. This means three meals a day Monday through Friday and two each day on the weekend, from the start of the semester through the end of finals. Realistically, most students will not eat at the dining hall every possible meal. Say, like me, you don't eat breakfast every day. Or say you are off campus for the entire reading and finals period. Or you eat at a friend's eating club a few times a week. All you have to do is skip 26 dinners, 36 brunches or lunches, 44 breakfasts, or some combination thereof over the semester. In all of these cases, you would save money by buying individual meals. More generally, the unlimited plan costs $2,600, so if the sum of the swipe costs of your meals is below $2,600 per semester, you'd save money by not having a meal plan.
An additional meal plan, the 95 block at an average cost of $15.05 per meal, is still more expensive than the most expensive individual meal purchase, dinner (which costs $13.50). Upperclassmen who choose the 95 meal plan would always save money paying for the meals individually if they could do so. But they can't if they live in a residential college, since they need to choose a meal plan.
Dining Services might argue that the meal plan is a way to ensure that students eat at the residential dining halls and not elsewhere. But offering individual meal purchases to that group of students won't take away from the communal dining hall experience. Purchasing meals individually is still eating at the dining hall. And if increased dining hall flexibility means that residential college upperclassmen eat at the dining hall less, quite frankly, they should be allowed to decide for themselves where to eat. I'd much rather see the University dangle extra incentives to eat in the dining hall instead of using restrictions to force them to eat there. Residential college upperclassmen should decide between eating at Whitman College and eating at Colonial Club, not whether to eat the cost of their meal plan so that they can eat at Colonial.
I propose that the administration add up how many meals we eat each semester and keep track of what type of meal it is. At the end of the semester we would be charged the lower of two prices: the sum of the individual prices of meals eaten at the dining hall or the minimum meal plan necessary. Under this system, the 95-meal block would never make sense. Other meal plans would make sense for some students but cost extra money for others. For students who always eat at the dining hall, nothing would change, so they won't be adversely affected.
Over the past couple of years, Princeton has been very vocal about giving students more dining hall choices, from joint eating club-residential college meal plans to Whitman College and the new Butler. Eliminating the need for upperclassmen to get a meal plan if they live in a residential college is the next logical step to expanding eating options, and it may make the prospect of life away from Prospect more appealing.
Conor Myhrvold is a sophomore from Seattle, Wash. He can be reached at myhrvold@princeton.edu.
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