After reading about the administration's newest effort in the "how to make more money off students" game, ("New Dining Plan is Finalized," Jan. 31), all I could do was to thank God I'm getting out of here in June. It wants to charge us $70 for the privilege of having a Declining Balance Account.
What I fail to grasp in this, however, is the use of the world privilege. How can a DBA possibly be a privilege when we have no choice of whether we want to have it or not? Charging students $210 a year for something we have no choice of having is merely a game of semantics. The administration could just be outright honest and tack it onto the tuition bill, but it would never give us the privilege of honesty.
A member of the class of '99 will pay $400 in these fees for the privilege of dining on campus. Simple math shows that if there are at least 3,500 students on campus each term, the administration's looking to haul in over $500,000 a year from this.
What I want to know is whether many other college administrations force all of their students to be on a meal plan. I think you would find that very few demand that the upperclassmen who live off campus eat in college dining halls. Notice also that graduate students at Tuck, Thayer, and the medical school don't have to be on the meal plan.
It's interesting that with all the administration's political correctness, in matters of real importance -- in matters of money -- we're treated like children, not as men and women capable of making our own lifestyle decisions. Most ridiculous is the way it clouds its true intentions by saying that it is only doing what's best for us. "If we eliminated the punch system for freshmen," it insists, "all the women would try and starve themselves and we'd have an epidemic of anorexia. We have to protect them from themselves, from this horrible fate!"
The real reason is that punches are the biggest cash cow in the meal system. The only place that a punch is actually worth more than you pay for it is at Full Fare. If you give a conservative estimate that each freshman is losing two dollars each time he uses a punch, that's about $25 a week for each person, multiplied by 1,000 freshmen, that's 25,000 every week -- $750,000 a year! And that doesn't even count upperclassmen who use punches.
On top of all these hidden charges, food on campus actually costs more than fast food one could purchase in the "real world." That's the most ludicrous fact about this. Last year I spent two terms as a transfer student at a British university, which treated students as something other than walking cash teller machines -- the food was one-third cheaper than anything one could buy in the surrounding town.
Every time I've wondered how a simple cheese sandwich could cost me $3.80 I get the standard two word answer -- Full Fare. They always insist that Dartmouth Dining Services doesn't make a profit because Full Fare is enormously expensive to run. To this I have a simple solution -- get rid of it! I'm certain that 75 percent of this campus could count the times on one hand that they've actually stepped foot in Full Fare. If you eat three times as much food as someone else, it's only fair that you should have to pay three times as much. There's no such thing as Full Fare in the real world. Why should women on this campus have to pay for all the six-foot two-inch, 250 pound men to stuff their faces? If Full Fare were eliminated, the Administration wouldn't have an excuse to hike up food prices.
