If there is one common complaint that I’ve heard among freshmen, it is the USC meal plans. As an incoming student, you have the choice to choose how many meals you want to purchase per week, whether it be 10, 14, 21 and so on.
The meal plan is a required part of freshman year and a costly one. Despite the cost and the strict number limit on meals, one of the biggest problems with our meal swipes is the time restraints on when you can and cannot use them. Students are allowed four meal swipes a day during restricted times labeled as breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight meal swipe. During each four- to five-hour time period, students are allowed to use only one meal swipe. However, most college students that I know get hungry more than once in a five hour span. Let’s say you want to get breakfast at 7 a.m. before your 8 a.m. class and then get a snack at 10 a.m. In this case, you would be out of luck.
Some may suggest that it is not a big deal to wait another hour to eat, but in the busy lives of students, it may just not fit into your schedule to wait around to eat all the time. In my case, I have a classes, a job, my sorority and another club that I have to balance my time around. When I can barely find time to eat at all, it is very frustrating to have to think about if I am allowed a meal swipe or not in my allotted eating time.
I am not sure of the purpose of the designated meal swipe times if we are already requiring students to stick to their purchased amount of weekly meals anyway. In our current system, the only thing that giving students certain times to eat is doing is causing meal swipes to go unused by the end of the week. Students would get more food or snacks if they were allowed to use multiple meal swipes, and this would cut down on another problem that Carolina Food Co. has with food waste. I can understand the aspect of a revised plan being less healthy and allowing for more overeating, but in reality, people are going to eat whether it is super convenient or not.
Now, overeating is done in combination with overspending, because students have to stock up on snacks and meals to eat in their dorms when they have utilized all of their swipes. Spending $1,409 on a semester’s worth of food is not fun, but finding out that some of your meals are going unused by the end of the week is infuriating. I believe that students would actually eat healthier if allowed to use all of their meal swipes in a week by being able to use them more than once in a meal period. At least in my case, I would be more inclined to use meal swipes on snacks like fruit bowls and vegetables that could be brought back to my dorms rather than having to grocery shop on top of my meal plan.
Another big issue with the meal plans are the meal plan dollars. This bonus to meal swipes are supposed to be used when you have already used your meal swipe for breakfast, lunch or dinner and you want something else, or if you have gone over the maximum dollar amount that can be used for meal swipes. Basically, this is just cash that you can load onto your CarolinaCard to conveniently pay for overages on a meal swipe. For example, lunch swipes cannot go over $6.78. If the meal is $6.92, you would have to pay the 14 cents with meal plan dollars. This seems to be just another way to suck money from students. Coming in, I believed that my expensive meal plan would at least cover my actual meal.
Through requiring students to purchase a meal plan, making it inevitable for students to not use all of their weekly meal swipes and making expensive food with sparing maximum meal swipe limits, eating is draining students’ pockets where we least expect it.