The Student Senate passed the Meal Plan Accountability Act 18-2 Sunday, which seeks to educate students about the high cost of their meal plans.
The act, sponsored by Senator Charlie Biscotto and authored by Brian Brown, a junior in the School of Public Affairs, asks the SG to inform students about the high cost of their meal plan swipes when compared to the cash price of food at TDR and the Tavern.
Research done by Brown and Josiah Lambert, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, shows that the average cost of a meal swipe on the 75-block plan is $11.73; on the 100-block, $10.95; on the 150-block, $10.43 and on the 200-block, $8.63. Further research shows the average cost of a meal at TDR is $9.60 - $7 at breakfast, $10 at lunch and $12 at dinner, when paid out of pocket. The average cost of a meal at the Tavern is $6.50.
Brown said not only is the cost of the meal plan not competitively priced for students, but that by now requiring sophomores to enroll in at least a 75-block meal plan if they live on campus, the university is making it unfair for students who are trying to save money.
"What's the university response to criticism of the meal plan?" Brown said. "It wasn't 'Let's make the meal plan more cost effective,' it was, 'Let's be compulsory and mandate sophomore enrollment.'"
Executive Director of Housing and Dining Julie Weber said she thinks AU has found a good middle ground in offering a meal plan where students have a variety of choices in their cafeteria and aren't penalized for not liking the food they swipe for, as they would be in a declining balance system which is used by schools like George Washington University and the University of Maryland.
Weber said the meal plan has been changed in the past for the benefit of the student from a weekly block plan to a block plan that only decreases as you use it.
Weber also said the cost breakdown of the money a student pays for the meal plan is not simple to show.
"Your meal plan pays for meals, staff and a chunk of it goes into the dining services reserve fund," she said.
The dining services reserve fund is the fund used to pay for the maintenance of the dining facilities at AU, Weber said. The spending of money from this fund is governed by internal university guidelines.
However, these guidelines are "not something I've seen," Weber said.
According to Nana An, the executive director of budget and payroll in AU's finance office, the university took in a little over $9 million from food service operations last year, and $6 million of that sum went to paying the contract with Bon Appetit. The rest of that money was put into a fund that is used to pay for facility improvements to the dining areas at the university, An said.
In the past, this fund - the Capital Improvements Fund - has been used to pay for improvements at Chick-Fil-A, Subway, the Eagle's Nest and vending machine renovation in Mary Graydon Center.
An said she was unaware of any university guidelines governing how the money in this fund is spent.
SG President Kyle Taylor said he is unsure whether or not to veto the bill because he believes more research is needed so that the SG can propose options to the university. He said he removed himself from the meal plan at the beginning of his sophomore year because he thought it was too expensive.
"I want the meal plan to be more competitive, but we have to be able to give viable alternatives to the university so that cost is not shifted to the students in their tuition," Taylor said.
Brown said the bill was not an attack on AU Housing and Dining, and its purpose is only to educate students about the lack of competitive pricing in their meal plans.
