BY ISAAC SORKIN and HENRY SWIFT

In print | October 5, 2006

A member of the general public eats 20 meals at Sharples each week and pays the fee at the door. This poor bastard will shell out $1702.50 over the course of the fall semester. The even poorer meal-plan-bound first-year, for the same quota of 20 Sharples meals per week, pays a board charge of $2510. If she were to use her 20 meals per week at Essie Mae’s (a theoretical impossibility, we know, but economists love to make simplifying assumptions) her $2510 would purchase the cash equivalent of only $963.75.

Those who are slightly older are magnanimously granted the privilege of the 17-meal plan, but don’t do much better. Juan non-Swattie pays $986.25 for the same amount of food that you could acquire by using two meals at Essie Mae’s each night. Add in a whopping $65 in points, and you receive a total of $1051.25 in “meal equivalency” for your $2510. Even if you tried to maximize the cash equivalent of your 17-meal plan and swipe into dinner twice at Sharples, you’d end up with the equivalent of only $1805 cash. And don’t get us started on the plight of the 14-meal planners (which we are — due, no doubt, to our feeble analytic abilities).

But this tale of woe and despair neglects several salient facts about the situation. The price at the door is hardly a free market price, determined by supply and demand. Unlike, say, Renato’s, whose only motive is profit, Swarthmore Dining Services’ price structure reflects many different motives.

First, the College may want to subsidize the cost of meals so that visiting parents can see their children in their natural environs without feeling ripped off. Similarly, it may be off-putting to the families of prospective students to pay exorbitant amounts of money for a Sharples meal.

Second, students don’t actually cover the totality of the college’s expenses. In 2006 – 2007, the college will spend something like $67,000 per student, and while the sticker price floats above $40,000, because of financial aid actual average revenue per student is closer to $28,000. Given that we aren’t paying for everything, the claim that we’re being ripped off is hard to sustain.

Third, even if Swarthmore were a business, the pricing structure might make sense. The marginal cost of each additional visitor is much lower than the average cost. Students on the meal plan are covering the cost of setting up Sharples operations for the semester and visitors merely pay the cost of the food they eat and the labor that is used to prepare it.

The truly insidious effect of the price structure is that the meal plan provides too strong of an incentive to eat in Sharples. As the calculations above show, the cash equivalent of eating at Sharples for every meal on a given meal plan is close to $700 more than eating at Essie Mae’s for every meal. Thus, students correctly feel that in order to get their “fair share” they need to eat in Sharples.

Yet students still purchase the 14- and 17-meal plans and eat in Essie Mae’s or at the coffee bars. They use points and give up a great deal in terms of cash equivalence because they implicitly value the additional flexibility that these meal plans provide. Does it make sense for the to college create additional stress in our lives by reducing our eating flexibility?

The College justifies having a meal plan that privileges Sharples on the grounds that Quakers eat together in one dining hall. Yet this is a fiction (we do have Essie Mae’s): fewer people eating in Sharples would not harm the community. After all, the main thing that binds us is misery poker, not pasta bar.

The meal plan should be restructured to be more flexible and transparent. The college should make explicit the approximately $800 dollars in “fixed costs” that it apparently requires and give us each the $113.50 in points a week it would take to take to go to Sharples for 20 meals a week (for a total of $1702.50 for the semester). We could then use those points at Sharples, Essie Mae’s or the coffee bars.

The College might want to limit how much we could spend per meal period — say, $10. To preserve the sanctity of Essie Mae’s as a faculty and staff cafeteria at prime lunch hour, points could be blocked during those times. And apportioning points by week would save the coffee addict who depletes all her points in the first month from scrounging for points among friends and significant others. While not perfect, this revision of the meal structure would provide a significant increase in flexibility for students.

Isaac and Henry are seniors. You can reach them at isorkin1@swarthmore.edu and hswift1@swarthmore.edu.

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