This semester, the University replaced an imperfect but fair meal plan with a more restrictive system—the block plan—that offers a set number of meals per semester rather than a set number of meals per week. This would be fine, if the number of meals allotted were enough to comfortably feed a student through the duration of the term. For any sophomore unfortunate enough to get stuck with the default meal plan, however, their budget for the semester is ridiculously limited: 105 meals and 675 points total, which spreads out to one meal and seven points available to spend per day. Unless a student eats two meals a day and nothing more, the plan utterly fails to provide reasonable sustenance.
To make matters worse, students and parents who log onto the e-portfolios to select a meal plan for the year are only given access to the total number of meals they receive per semester, as opposed to the number of meals they can have in a given day. Because this website fails to break down the total number of meals per semester into daily allotments, students and parents may be unaware of the precise number of meals they can have in a day. While we do not want to prescribe a motive to this set-up, it does seem that this system would make it easy for the University to obscure the actual number of meals a student will be receiving per day on the basic meal plan.
Perhaps worst of all is the impact on financial aid students. Taken together, the low daily allotment of both meals and points and the unclear presentation of meal plan options can easily lead to students being unaware of their daily allotment of meals and points, and therefore spending beyond their means. It then falls to parents to re-fill their child’s meal plan with additional funds merely to get through the semester. For students on financial aid, a mandatory addition of points may not be feasible. While some administrators may claim that this new meal plan benefits financial aid students, as it would no longer require them to pay for meals they might not eat, we would argue that the administration has transformed a surfeit of meals into a dearth.
Wesleyan expects their students to push themselves in both academics and extracurricular activities. If the administration prides itself on having students pursue an active and challenging daily schedule, it should not pile on the added worry of managing so basic a daily need.
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