The College’s meal plan has hit a new high: students on the five-meal plan are now paying $14.50 a meal. That’s about twice the cost of buying each dinner meal individually at $7.50.
“I think that there’s two separate programs there,” Oberlin’s Bon Appétit General Manager Jack Cahill said. “We don’t want to be uncompetitive when we have guests coming.”
The bottom line, said Associate Vice President for Finance Ron Watts, is that “there is a lot of fixed cost that [the meal plan] has to cover.”
Namely, the College’s general overhead. In essence, he said, the meal plan subsidizes other costs like financial aid, labor costs and the mortgages on College buildings like Stevenson.
“The auxiliaries have to supposrt the regular programs,” he continued. “You do have people who have scholarship that is beyond tuition.”
The meal plan, he added “needs to produce a gross margin to support all the costs of the College because it’s a part of it.”
Stevenson, like many College halls, is on a sizable long-term mortgage. The College has five such board halls.
Moreover, Watts said that Oberlin pays dining employees higher wages because they are unionized.
“The compensation and benefits that go with it would be less at schools that are non-union,” he said.
The five-meal plan, the seven-meal plan, the 10-meal plan and the 160-meal block plan each cost students more than $7.50 per meal. (See page 4 for an individual cost breakdown.)
The per-meal figure can be calculated by taking the number of weeks in the semester, subtracting one (CDS will not serve meals during October break this year), deducting flex points as equal with dollars and then dividing by the number of meals per week.
Although the 19- and 14-meal plans cost less per meal than paying the nominal guest price, the other plans rank among high-end town dining options.
The all-you-can-eat New Chinatown Buffet in Elyria, for example, which hosts four rows of Asian cuisine and sushi, costs $9.99 plus tax.
This is because with any meal plan you’re paying for overhead, but for additional meals you’re largely only paying for the cost of the extra food, Watts said.
“You go from the 5-meal plan to the 19-meal plan and the price only goes up about $200,” he added.
The price of the meal plan has come under sharp student criticism this year, with some saying that the College or Bon Appétit must stand to benefit financially from the new arrangement.
Cahill says that’s simply not true.
Bon Appétit, the company which manages Campus Dining Services, is paid a flat management fee. Whether the meal plans costs more or less or offer variant options is irrelevant to Bon Appétit’s bottom line, Cahill asserted.
“There is no profit margin for Bon Appétit in this arrangement,” he stated. “The number of meals served by us has no impact on Bon Appetit’s profitability.”
“The pricing of the meal plan is something that the College does,” he added. “We work with them in a consulting role.”
Cahill also said he couldn’t understand why students haven’t been switching to the 10-meal plan in droves. The idea, he explained, was to “right-size” the meal plan, by bringing it in line with the average number of meals students ate per week last year, which was 9.6.
“We really thought that students would move themselves around a good deal more than they did,” he added. Of the 2,112 students on a campus meal plan, just 206 signed up for 10 meals a week.
Cahill said he has instructed employees to tell students to consider switching to the 10-meal plan if students complain about having fewer flex points. This year, the 10-meal plan has the same number of flex points as the 14-meal plan had last year.
“They really should switch,” he remarked. “It’s in their interest.”
But many students are not happy with the new plan.
“That 80 flex does not make up for the seven other meals in a week,” DeCafé student employee Vanessa Fatton said.
The model, however, assumes that each flex point is worth one dollar, as the College asserts.
A pint of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream costs $3.95 at the Decafé, but weighs in at $3.69 at Gibson’s and $3.49 at Missler’s. Bubble Yum rings in at 60 cents a pack, whereas it’s just 50 cents at Missler’s and 45 cents at Gibson’s. A 12 pack of soda hits $5.25 in Wilder’s basement, but can be bagged for $3.99 at Missler’s.
These prices were quoted Tuesday evening.
A DeCafé employee, who declined to be named, said that their prices are higher because they can’t buy in bulk like most grocery stores: there isn’t enough room to store merchandise. Produce and meats, she said, are also fresher at Décafé than those bought elsewhere.
Milk and soda are the same price at the DeCafé and Missler’s.

“As long as I’ve been here, students have been upset about the meal plan, and it’s been getting progressively worse each year,” senior senator Jesse Kanson-Benanav said. “Res. Life and students together need to continue to reexamine what the role of the meal plan is at Oberlin College, especially the reduction of flex points in the meal plan.”

“I think that’s where most of the student outrage is coming from this year,” he added.