

College life is about finding out what interests you in life and being able to get an education in that field to further your knowledge and to better your chances and opportunities. Freshman year of college is the transitional period between your high school education alongside living at your parents and the responsibilities that come with college workloads and adult life. As there are many things to worry about in this year of transition, many colleges try to ease the amount of worries a student might have over this year. Universities have on-campus housing, numerous clubs, sports and activities, dining halls, and meal plans. All of the things allow students to feel more involved on campus and create stress free environment, for the time being. Introduced sophomore year, and for some, junior year, students experience the responsibilities of living off campus and having to make more efforts to plan ahead. Students will now have to wake up earlier, plan ahead when they will be leaving to get to or from campus and will have to better plan out how to balance responsibilities such as grocery shopping, work, class, errands, social life, and sleep. This balance is a part of every student's life and the older they get, the more responsibilities they will acquire. With the amount of responsibilities an adult has, every step to lessen the number of concerns can make a large impact on their lives and stress levels. 

In a perfect world, we can get rid of certain stressors in our lives, so let's just get rid of a common stressor, food. Obviously we cannot just get rid of the need for food, so we will hypothetically get rid of the need to plan and prepare a meal, go grocery shopping, and have to 


budget week or even monthly for food. We will now (hypothetically) give all adults a meal plan. In theory this new meal plan might have some great effects on adult life. 

In the morning, you wake up, take a shower, get ready for the day and then leave the house a few minutes early so that you can grab something to eat before errands and work. You travel only a few blocks away from the house to grab your breakfast. While travelling you quickly think about what type of food you are in the mood for today, at this moment. You decide you want a Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuit, some hashbrowns, and a water. You go into the food court, grab exactly this meal wait in the line that only has a couple of other people, pay for this meal with your piece of plastic that also serves as your ID, knowing that this meal fits on the allowed amount (that being $5.40) and you find a seat to quickly eat your meal. The leave the food court and head off to run a few errands and go to work, with very little thought and effort. It is now noon and you are about to take your lunch break, you daydream about what food you are going to get and you fantasize about a hot and cheesy pizza bagel from Einsteins. Conveniently, you only have to walk a few blocks to the closest Einsteins. You wait in line to order your food and then tell the woman at the register what you want. You decide to get another cup of water to make sure you stay under your limit of $6.50, considering a pizza bagel is a little expensive. Anyway this way you are being healthy, everyone can use a little more water in their diet. You wait for your name to be called and you sit down to eat your food and you have some spare time, so you decide to go on your phone to watch cute cat videos while you eat. You go back to finish your work day and then go some to sit for a bit, maybe watch some more cat videos or read up on some local news and happenings. You then prepare yourself for the outside world yet again. Tonight you will eat Pandini's pizza. Despite the fact that you had a pizza bagel earlier, you decide you want pizza, because this time it 

is a real pizza and you are very well aware of the fact that you can fit a cookie and a drink other than water into your meal plan of $7.00. You take your food to the main cafeteria so that you can eat with a friend while getting the opportunity to make fun of the terrible karaoke upstairs, because you forgot that today is Tuesday, and on this night we have karaoke. You say goodbye to your friend and leave for home with a new life lesson. You now know to attempt to remember not to come to this specific building on Tuesday nights. You wander on home finish up any other work you might have and go to sleep to get a well-deserved goodnight's rest. 

Meal plans are placed into students' lives to simplify their busy schedules and to encourage time management. Colleges even advertise their meals plans as beneficial to "Saving time and money" along with a list of other benefits allowing to "Spend less time grocery shopping, avoid[ing] ATM transaction costs, and a wide variety of quality foods [while] dining in a friendly, comfortable atmosphere close to classes" (Why A Meal Plan?). All of these things sound like a perfect fit for a busy student. Meal plans are even known for their health benefits, as shown in controlled dietary analysis, "participation in the prepaid campus meal plan appears to offer modest nutritional benefits to students through increased servings of foods from fruit, vegetable, and meat groups" (Brown). Meal plans even deter students away from unhealthy food choices such as fast food "increasing levels of health consciousness and reducing access to fast food restaurants through [meal] plans may reduce college students' consumption of fast food" (Dingman). Students are even encouraged to participate in social activities by being around such a number of students, encouraging social interacting, which can lead to new connections, and to feeling like a part of a group. This encouragement can kick start a student's college experience and be recognized as a positive routine. A group of students from Tulane University were asked how they felt about their 


campus's meal plan. All of the feedback was positive even the food workers had something to say about the meals, "no matter what I serve, it's made with love" (Wood). The encouragement universities give to students through meal plans seems to have several benefits for many students. It allows students to interact with others while having to not think about having to stress over meals. On the other hand what happens when the day is not as predictable and a student is not able to maintain a regular schedule based off of the workload they have to keep up with or general traffic they might run into? Lets' go back to our daily routine we were looking at earlier with the adult having a regular meal plan. 

Today you wake up a bit later because you had a lot of work to do the night before, you take your shower, you get ready, and you realize that the shirt you had planned to wear today for work is nowhere to be found and you run around the house trying to find it. You realize you put it in the dryer so that you could turn it on before you leave to make sure it had no wrinkles in it. So you turn on the dryer and wait for it to release its wrinkles. You realize the only way you have time to do so is to not get food. Considering you had planned on not needing food at home because of your meal plan, you are forced not to eat breakfast. But this is okay because you will just try and get lunch a little earlier today, your convince yourself you aren't even that hungry and you grab your wrinkle-free shirt and head off to work. During work you are so distracted and busy that you forget to get lunch. It's now almost 4 and you have missed your chance to use your lunch swipe. Thus, today you just leave work a bit early because you didn't take lunch and you will get dinner a couple hours early. You get off work and rush over to get food. Today you want to get Mexican because that seems the most filling to you. You wait in line but there happen to be many others who also want Mexican, and there is only one person working at this line. You wait 10 


minutes just to order and you decide that you want chips on the side and a drink for the caffeine. You know that this will go over your meal plan but you believe that you have enough spare meal dollars on your card to cover it. You get in the line to pay and tell them to put the rest on your meal dollars and come to find out you are short 45 cents. You tell the cashier in your anxious voice that you have no change and they give you a glare and then they take out their workers card and out it on their account out of kindness. You thank them, feeling bad but go on your way because your hunger is telling you to sit down. You eat your meal and find your way back home. You decide to just relax and most definitely watch baby kitten videos, ignoring what local news and activities there is today, not feeling the desire to be social anytime soon. You fall into your food coma and find yourself wide awake a few hours later somehow wanting more food. The answer is clear, get more food. The only problem is you have not snacks and it is 11:15pm. This leaves 45 minutes before you even have your next usable meal swipe and there is only 2 open food places at this time forcing you to go across town to get food. After a very long 45 minutes you find the energy to comprehend the food you want and then wait in another very long line to order and pay and you then munch on chips while you go back home. You sit down and eat and then fall into your second food coma, to only wake back up in the morning very tired wanting only to sleep in. 

There are cons that come along with having things scheduled for you. Although there are the positives to having food made for you, it can be difficult to get to a food court and if for some reason you are unable to make it to the food court on a certain day, you are unable to allow someone else to get food for you. "Numerous campuses have installed biometric hand-scanners on campuses to allow students and staff to enter into dining halls and other campus buildings" (Kiernan). These scanners are put in place specifically to enforce students to come into the dining halls and to make 


sure that no one else is using their meal plans even if they have been given permission to do so, by the card holder. This system forces students to take a step back from their meal plan in situations where they might be busy, out of town, or just too sick to be moving around campus. Despite the fact that the student has pre-paid for their meals, they will have to use their own money to buy meals not on campus or to have to plan to not be able to go on campus and to buy groceries that they might not be able to store in a dorm. An article in The New York Times describes how "college students are being over-charged for dining and even students who do not have plans are being charged to cover costs of non-related services" (Saul). Bringing to light the expenses of just having a meal plan. Students should not be forced into unexpected charges for amenities they did not use and in no way benefit their education. Saul also notes that universities have the tendency to overprice food and to charge more for meal plans than the amount of money students are given to pay for food on each swipe. In addition to over-pricing food some colleges don't allow refunds on un-used meal plan swipes "For plans with points, colleges somehow get away with expiring the points at the end of the semester or year without rolling them over to the next semester or providing the student a refund" (Landes). Universities are setting up unrealistic expectations for students. Students should not be required to know their first year exactly the amount of food the will be eating over the year and be punished by a loss of money with no refund for not being able to expect and plan for road bumps during the upcoming year. 

Recognizing the importance of the pros and cons in an argument over mandatory meal plans is very important. It brings to light general pros and cons to education especially in the later years of education, when students are in universities where they have a sudden increase of responsibilities. The freshman year of college allows students to respect and understand their own 


responsibilities and it allows they to recognize the choices that they have to make in their lives to best suit the type of education they want to pursue and how their lifestyle must change to fit their futures. Many groups of people have encouraged students to take it into their own hands to step away from meal plans and to recognize alternatives in life choices. One book by Rhonda Lauret Parkinson encourages students to "take a step back from meal plans and look into cooking at home for a reasonable price" (Parkinson). The book have numerous $5 meal options that allow for a variety of foods just as a meal plan would, but allows the students to make more realistic choices and start to recognize realistic adult food choices that coincide with common responsibilities. Other groups recognize that "in many cases, new college students just aren't going to use the largest meal plan around" (My College Guide). Students should feel as if their goals for their first year of college can be easily met. Many meal plans lead students disappointed and feeling as if their money is being wasted by their university, breaking a level of trust between education and student. Moving on from simple personal choices that students can make "the New Jersey State Assembly passed bill A2811, also known as the bill that would ban all four-year private and public universities in the state, except Princeton, from requiring students to purchase meal plans" (Park). This bill would allow the students not the university to make the personal decision on meal plans. This bill takes the step forward and says "enough is enough" and stands up for the students entering into a better education without ripping them off.

Bills such as bill A2811 recognize the scenarios that were played through earlier in this paper and recognizes that students have different first year experiences and should not be forced into a mold in education system that should emphasis personal choice and experimentation in the responsibilities that will affect the future of society. Meal plans should not be mandatory, they 


should be recognized as an option and they should become flexible so that changes can be made in the students experience without punishment in early stages of education as a maturing adult.

