On Tuesday night, the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) sent a memorandum to members of the administration criticizing the University’s current meal plan on a number of fronts. Primarily, the memo argued that the meal plan forces freshmen and sophomores to purchase an unnecessary amount of meals each semester in proportion to points.

“The meal plan is constructed in such a way that it systemically causes students to choose the wrong meal plan for their dining habits,” the memo read.

In the document, the WSA stated that freshmen and sophomores were collectively charged $359,448 for unused meals last semester. Incorporating unused points from the entire student body, the WSA charged that students are collectively losing upwards of $1,000,000 every year in unused meals and points.

The WSA’s numbers are rough approximations, however, because the administration only disclosed the percentages of meals that went unused last semester. The WSA’s estimates of unused points are particularly rough; a footnote about the $1,000,000 estimated loss cited the use of “anecdotal” reports as the basis for the approximation.

“Specific data on the numbers of unused points were not provided to us,” the memo read. “On the basis of anecdotal accounts given to the WSA by students, we can make a very conservative estimate that the average student has at least 55 unused points as they approach the end of each semester.”

The memo does not specify whether the points were purchased with the original meal plan or added over the course of the semester. Based on this number, the WSA also concluded that the student body spends $308,000 annually on unused points.

The WSA relied heavily on estimation because detailed figures on students’ use of the meal plan are unavailable. According to Director of the Usdan University Center Michelle Myers-Brown, the system that keeps track of student meal plan usage erases all the data at the end of each semester. The information is stored on an aging computer system that is meant to ensure that dining services function every semester; although the system was never intended to catalog information, there are now efforts in place to make it function as an archive, she said.

“It’s a transactional system,” she said. “It’s not a student financial information system.”

Although the administration has suggested the figures are not representative of the whole picture, they have not ruled out their plausibility entirely. Dean of Students Rick Culliton received the memo, but said that he had not had much time to analyze the data.

“I think they’ve reduced the percentages down to a possible figure, but I don’t know if it is accurate,” he said.

Culliton said that if the University did allow for more flexibility by lowering the minimum number of required meals, there would have to be sacrifices to alleviate the added financial burden. This could include increases in dining fees, he said, or the reduction of services such as staffing, food quality, and hours of operation.

“The fact that not every student will use every meal is factored into the budget just as on other campuses,” Culliton said in a statement. “Just as some students may take five credits in a semester when other students take three or four, it doesn’t impact their tuition. If every student used all of their meals, the costs of the dining program would need to increase.”

According to Associate Vice President for Finance Nathan Peters, the University pays Bon Appetit a fixed but negotiable management fee every year and all revenue from the meal plan goes into either Bon Appetit’s fee or other expenses related to dining, such as heating Usdan. The WSA has suggested that the University cut back in other parts of its budget and shift the resources to the dining program so that students would incur a smaller financial burden from the meal plan.

Every semester, freshmen are given four meal plan options, ranging from 135 to 285 meals with a contingent number of points; sophomores’ meal options range from 105 to 285 meals. The WSA is arguing that the options with the lowest required meals are not low enough, given that the average number of unused meals per semester for students on the lowest option for each class is over 20. In part, because meals do not carry over from fall to spring semester, the WSA estimates that the average freshman purchases $568.80 in unused meals every year.

In the 2007-08 academic year, when Bon Appetit first arrived on campus, meals were available on a weekly basis—the option with the lowest required meals for freshmen was five meals per week—which added up to 65 per semester—and 953 points per semester. In spring 2008, the meal plan was shifted to a block schedule where the minimum number of meals per semester was 135 for freshmen.

Administrators said the main impetus behind the increase in required meals was the shift away from a pay-per-item system at the Usdan Marketplace, which had caused long lines and confusion during the fall semester, to the more efficient all-you-can-eat system.

In the memo, the WSA put forth a number of possibilities, including reducing the number of mandatory meals, allowing students to rollover meals between semesters, implementing an unused meal point refund program, reevaluating junior and senior point requirements, and even replacing the prepaid meal plan system with point-of-sale cash purchasing. WSA representative Bradley Spahn ’11 suggested that freshmen and sophomores should be able to purchase the all-points meal plan that is currently reserved for juniors and seniors.

The only actual formal recommendation in the memo is that the administration approve a meal plan task force that would “examine the strength and weaknesses of our current meal plan” and provide proposals to change the system. Administrators said they have not decided yet whether they will approve such a task force.

WSA President Michael Pernick ’10 said the current goal is to convince administrators that the current meal system is, in fact, flawed.

“The first goal that we have right now is to establish conclusively and convince the administration that there is a problem with the meal plan,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind that the meal plan is broken and unfair.”

According to Myers-Brown, a survey found that student satisfaction with the overall dining program had increased from 49 percent in 2005, when Aramark was the University’s food service company, to 79 percent in 2009 with Bon Appetit.

“There are some people who are very happy with the meal plan,” she said.