The new meal plans received mix reviews from University of Massachusetts students after Residential Dining revamped its plan options for the start of the academic year.
Garett DiStefano, director of Residential Dining, said students had worries about wasting their meal swipes on these plans, which led to the Dining Dollars solution.
“You’re going to maximize the benefit of your plan by using the Dining Dollars for small purchases,” he said. “Students have the opportunity to buy whatever they want and maximize the value of their plans.”
The dining administration wants to increase student knowledge of how to best use their meal plans, according to DiStefano. There are five YCMP plans. Two plans, YCMP 155 and YCMP 65, offer a combination of meal swipes and Dining Dollars that can be used in dining halls or in retail locations. YCMP On the Go consists of 800 Dining Dollars and five retail or dining commons meals. YCMP Gold and YCMP Platinum only offer dining hall or retail meal swipes, not Dining Dollars. The Gold and Platinum plans are also open only to juniors and seniors who are residents or commuters.
Each retail meal swipe on the YCMP plan is valued at $9.50. If a retail meal is less than that price, the leftover amount is forfeited.
“The intention isn’t to do that,” DiStefano said. “Our intention is to maximize student use.”
“I think it’s kind of frustrating … to have it always equal up to that,” said Courtney Spleen, a junior on the YCMP Off-Campus 65 plan.
DiStefano, the finance director, the director of retail dining and the executive director of auxiliary services all collaborated to reach a final dollar value on the meal swipes.
“It’s a collaboration, but we get a lot of input from (retail dining). We can’t run them out of business by not covering their costs,” said Claudia Brown, finance director of Auxiliary Enterprises. “(We have to) figure out what we can afford, (and) they have to tell us what it costs them.”
“It’s a really good plan,” said Stacey Beatty, a junior kinesiology major who is on the YCMP Gold plan. “I do think that it’s overpriced though. Each (swipe) is worth $9.50, so basically what the plan is worth to me is $9.50, but I pay over $1,200 for it.”
The YCMP meal plans’ prices recently increased by about 5 percent as well. DiStefano said this is due to factors such as the increasing cost of goods like milk and the necessity to adjust dining workers’ pay using the Cost-of-Living adjustments.
The Unlimited plan, which DiStefano says is the most commonly used student meal plan, did not go up in price.
He added that the dining administration wanted to showcase the value of that particular plan.
If a student’s retail meal swipe goes over $9.50, according to DiStefano, he or she can use cash to make up the difference, use Dining Dollars or use another meal swipe. The use of another meal swipe, however, means that the student forfeits the monetary value of the rest of the swipe.
DiStefano believes it is much more common now for student meal swipes in retail dining locations to add up to $9.50, due to the addition of combo meals equaling about $9.50 at places like Blue Wall.
According to DiStefano, between 92 and 95 percent of student retail meal swipes, sometimes as much as 98 percent, are fully utilized.
However, Beatty said her retail meals only add up to $9.50 about 20 percent of the time, and that is if she purposefully adds extra items to increase the cost.
“We know that less than half of 1 percent (of meal plan funds) are left on the table,” Brown said.
Dining Services has approximately $200,000 in leftover money from all student meal plans each year. The money is rolled into the Board Plan’s general operating fund. The board plan is also known as residential dining, which includes all the dining commons and meal plans, according to Brown.
“The money can’t go anywhere else,” she said..
The auxiliary enterprises departments of finance and IT, together with managers from Residential Dining, Retail Dining, and Hotel and Conference Services, generate their budgets beginning in October each year. During this process, each operation decides the amount of money it will transfer from the general operating fund to repair and replacements, A long-term fund with money put aside for future, unknown projects, like large-scale building repairs.
Patricia LeBoeuf can be reached at [email protected].
