A Dartmouth student might guess that "Big Red Bucks" are some strange foreign currency or that "ACDC" is only a rock band.
But those terms are regulars in some of the diverse dining services at colleges around the country, where offerings range from Burger King to tofu.
Dartmouth switched from its punch system to the current declining balance accounts three years ago -- but most colleges in the Ivy League and beyond prefer plans in which students pay for a certain number of "all you care to eat" meals per week.
Almost all of the students who spoke with The Dartmouth said their colleges allow them to pay for about seven, 10, 14 or 20 meals per week at the beginning of each semester.
Very few students at other colleges said their schools refund money for meals they do not eat.
Dining facilities at different colleges cover a much wider range of options than payment plans do. Offerings include small cafes, fast food, student "co-ops" and eating clubs.
Dartmouth Dining Services is just one program in a vast array of food services designed to meet the needs of students at different colleges around the country.
Quaker cards and flex bucks
The meals-per-week program is the most common payment system, but several colleges -- particularly urban ones -- add extra twists to their plans.
At the University of Pennsylvania, student Lia Fantuzzo said students use "Quaker cards" or "Penn cash" in addition to the "Penn card," which is used to pay for each all-you-can-eat meal.
She said they can place money on Quaker cards for meals at fast food chains or approximately 20 other restaurants near the campus.
At the beginning of each semester, students receive $25 of Penn cash, which they can use at small campus cafes. Offerings at the cafes include tacos, muffins, candy, croissants and pizza.
Fantuzzo chose not to buy a meal plan following her first semester at Penn because she estimated she was paying around $11 per meal.
"It depends on where you eat, but on the whole the food is pretty good," she said. "But I tend to think it's not worth what you pay."
At Yale University, student Dan Sommers said people who pay for 14 meals per week receive 100 "flex bucks," which can be spent at three different restaurants in New Haven.
He said the "flex bucks" are not very popular, because they pay for much less than the same amount of money would buy on-campus.
"People get angry about it, because it's a total rip-off," Sommers said.
Most students said the food at their schools is fine -- but Sommers was the one person to openly complain about the quality of his university's food.
He called Yale's offerings "pretty bad," describing both the salad and the deli meats as "nasty," and saying the school's dining offerings are "not some sort of cornucopia."
The color of money
Cornell University, ranked by the Princeton Review as the Ivy League school with the best food, has also implemented one of the most complex payment systems of all the Ivies.
Ed Witko, general manager of Cornell's dining services, said students pay for a certain number of meals per week at all-you-can-eat facilities.
Additionally, at "cash-op" dining halls, students can buy food a la carte. Their purchases count as one meal on their plans, but students are limited in the amount they can spend at the cash-ops.
Cash-op facilities are the only ones that allow students to take food out of the cafeterias.
Cornell students may also buy "Big Red Bucks," a declining balance system that supplements their meal plans. With those bucks, students may go to all-you-can-eat facilities and buy an individual item, such as a soda.
Witko said Big Red Bucks are beneficial because students can buy something small without paying for an entire meal.
In terms of its actual food, he said Cornell boasts "one of the most complete and unique stir fry performed in front of your eyes on a college campus."
Vassar College is one of the few schools that offers a declining balance account, which it calls a point system. Student Gabe Anderson said points are "comparable, or maybe a little bit less" than a dollar.
Anderson said students can either eat at the "All Campus Dining Center" -- known as "ACDC" -- or the "Retreat," a more specialized and expensive cafeteria. Students are allotted more points for ACDC than the Retreat.
Students on financial aid at Vassar were previously not allowed to eat at the Retreat, but Anderson said controversy about discrimination prompted the college to change the rule this year.
Vassar does not refund money to students who do not spent it all by the year's end.
But Vassar's point office keeps a list of students who want to sell their points to each other at cheap prices, and students take advantage of a computer program called "Broadcast" to advertise their extra points.
Anderson said Vassar's food is fine, but more diversity would increase satisfaction.
"There is a lot of variety, but not so much that you never get to a point where you've had everything, and you get tired of it," he said.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the few schools to refund any money that students do not spend.
Student Frank Dabek said they are not required to pay for any meal plan beforehand, but are billed at the end of each semester.
If they do pay in advance, students need not worry about using all of the money on their plans.
"The send you a check for the difference if you don't use it all," Dabek said.
He said the food at MIT is "edible -- that's about all the praise I'll give it."
Unique offerings
Among the schools with the most unique eating options are Duke, Stanford, Princeton and Brown.
At Duke University, students are provided with a system similar to what people find in mall food courts.
In most areas, Duke's 6,000 undergraduate students walk down a line of small restaurants and choose from a variety of offerings including Chinese food, Burger King, Italian food and deli sandwiches.
Student Jay Kamm said there is also one student-run, tablecloth restaurant and one typical college cafeteria.
Kamm said the majority of dining establishments at Duke are slightly privatized. They are commercial facilities that are run by the university and hire Duke's employees.
Duke's dining commercialization seems to have caused some problems. Kamm said the dining services have the highest employee absence rate at the university.
Students at Duke can also use their meal plans for food from seven off-campus restaurants in Durham, N.C., Kamm said.
He said off-campus food from is "pretty popular," but in order to keep them from completely avoiding campus dining, the university only allows students to order after seven on weekday evenings and after two p.m. during weekends.
Kamm, who said students pay about $1,000 per semester for food, said the dining offerings at Duke are "relatively popular."
"No matter what you do on a college campus, if you require people to eat a certain number of meals, they're not going to be happy," he said.
At Stanford University, students may choose among three different dining options.
Student Therese Lee said the most expensive plan is the $1,200-per-semester dormitory dining, which provides typical college cafeteria food.
She said the quality is "okay," and some dormitory dining halls are better than others -- but she knows "some people who have survived on rice and soy sauce."
Upperclass students who live in college-owned houses may choose to pay $900 for a "self-op" plan.
Many self-ops hire their own cooks. The students help clean the kitchen after meals and do more extensive cleaning on the weekends.
Lee said the quality of the food at the self-ops varies, but students like them because they can tailor the food to their own groups' preferences.
At "co-op" houses, Stanford students pay $500 and cook the food themselves.
At Princeton University, upperclass students may also join a co-op. Student Griffen White said others either fend for themselves or make the popular decision to join an eating club.
Eating clubs require students to pay a certain amount of money for membership each year, and the clubs hire cooks to prepare their food.
Dues for the eating clubs are more expensive than a contract with the dining services, but the cost is reflected in the quality of the offerings.
"Eating clubs are generally considered to have superior quality food," White said.
Freshmen and sophomores at Princeton are divided by lottery into five residential colleges, each of which has a cafeteria.
"The cafeteria [food] is standard fare -- it's not awful, but it's not great," White said.
Underclassmen are allowed to eat at any college and can also occasionally trade meals with students in eating clubs.
Rather than providing unique types of eating facilities, Brown University's dining services are known for some of their unusual culinary options.
Gretchen Willis, director of dining at Brown, said students are particularly pleased with the school's salad bars, which include 75 different foods, including tuna and tofu.
Here in Hanover
Perhaps continuing the rivalry between the two schools, student Adam Cohen said Harvard University's food is "better than Dartmouth -- I've eaten up there."
But Dartmouth must be doing something right, since it is the only Ivy League school other than Cornell in the top 10 of the Princeton Review's rankings of college food quality -- and Director of Dining Services Tucker Rossiter said students at Dartmouth pay the lowest prices for food in the Ivy League.
At the College, all students living on-campus choose among three different meal plans.
Rossiter said about 3,500 students choose either the $700 or $475 plan. Students pay a $50 service fee to DDS for the $475 plan, bringing the total cost to $525.
He said fewer than 200 students usually pick the $835 plan. The College provides $65 extra worth of DBA for those people, so they can buy $900 worth of food during one term.
Students living off-campus may choose a $300 plan, with an additional $100 service fee.
Rossiter said all students are required to pay for some sort of meal plan, due to the general feeling that "everyone should participate in the dining program at Dartmouth."
Although the College is relatively unique in its use of the declining balance account, Rossiter said the per-meal "punch" system had diminished in popularity.
He said students felt it was unfair for everyone to pay the same amount for each meal, because some people eat much more than others.
Rossiter said students wanted more variety in their dining options. Without price differentiation at the different facilities, this was impossible.
Like most colleges, Dartmouth does not refund money left in students' accounts at the end of each term.
Rossiter said most people are not affected by the non-refundable plans, because 75 percent of student spend about $123 more than their meal plan allots each term.
Around 200 students do not spend all of the money in their accounts, but they usually only have about five dollars left, he said.
Rossiter said sales at Topside increase at the end of each term. Overall sales at the convenience store have risen 50 percent in the past year.
Some colleges such as MIT and Brandeis University have chosen to pay external companies to run their dining facilities for them.
Student Adam Greenwald said Brandeis hired Aramark to take over next year in order to provide services, expand facilities and improve quality.
Rossiter said a company like Aramark would respond much less enthusiastically to student needs and complaints than a College-run program would.
He said it is also unlikely that the College would consider providing services such as fast food or other commercial facilities in the dining halls.
"To the best of my knowledge over the years, students don't want that anyway," Rossiter said. "And we'd also like to think that we do things a little better than they do."
Fouad Elnaggar '98 said he would like fast food options, either within the College's dining services or in Hanover.
"This whole town is Dartmouth, and if Dartmouth says we can have some fast food restaurants in town, it would happen," he said. "I mean they want to have this stupid little-town appearance, but then they have a Gap on Main Street, so that doesn't make any sense."
He said the declining balance plan is superior to the punch system, because it makes eating in Hanover's restaurants more attractive often.
"If you have punches, it means you can't eat out as much, because you have to use the punches or lose your money," he said.
