CONNOR HOFFMAN
Assistant News Editor
The Faculty Student Association (FSA) has decided to make several changes to student meal plans for next year in order to deal with inflation and decreasing enrollment.
Darin Schulz, the executive director of FSA, explained that FSA’s financial situation this has had an effect on the plans for the upcoming one.
“We’re looking at about a 25 percent decline in meal plan participation,” said Schulz. “With that, we’re operating at about $3 million less revenue per year.”
Schulz said also that FSA decided to change the meal plans to give students more meals. That way, they would run out of them less.
“Ten meals wasn’t enough to eat during the week, and it’s not enough for most,” said Schulz.
Schulz explained that out of all the options that were presented, these changes were a good compromise.
“We have to either reduce our expense exposure or increase revenue. When you have declining enrollment, the only way to increase revenue is to increase meal plan rates,” said Schulz. “The other option is to decrease expenses … so by decreasing expenses we could do it a multitude of ways. We can reduce offerings, we can reduce hours or we can reduce the numbers of units we have out there.”
The meal plans now will have a higher amount of meals in exchange for a lower amount of points. Meal plan one will consist of 17 meals a week and 225 points, and it will cost $2,565.
Schulz also explained that FSA is the only food service that has meal plans with low meals and high points, and that most other nearby school food vendors have high meals and low points.
Also, he mentioned that meal plan six is a new meal plan for next year, which will cost $2,000 and was created to offer a reasonable meal plan for juniors and seniors that will be living off campus.
Schulz explained that, generally, the meal plans increase $100 a year, but this year they decided to only raise the prices $50 because they were able to cut one hour out of their operations.
He explained that just cutting back one hour of operation at all FSA units saves them a good amount of money. Closing Centre Pointe an hour early saves $15,000 an hour just for labor costs, and closing Starbucks early saves $6,000 per hour.
Also, meal plan allowances for the next year have changed. Next year, students will be able to get $7 worth of food at any FSA owned business, but at Starbucks and Tim Hortons, students will now get $5.50.
Schulz said that FSA mainly had to do this because they have to pay for the rights to use the names for Tim Hortons and Starbucks. For every dollar they get in revenue, they have to pay 8 percent to Tim Hortons or Starbucks in royalties to use their brands.
Student reaction to these changes seem to be quite mixed.
Derek Fie, a sophomore sports management major, doesn’t mind a small increase in meal plan prices. And if it helps increase meal plan quality, he feels it’s justified.
“I’m happy that they’re going to move it up now,” said Fie. “I think something had to be changed, whether it was change the price of the food or give us more of the meal money. So I’m glad they did at least something.”
Kristen Keane, a junior music education major, is not happy that they decided to cut hours at some of the places.
“Fredonia doesn’t really offer that many places to eat on campus, and so with the choices we have, my friends and I would always go to Tim Hortons and get a coffee or something at, like, 10 o’clock,” said Keane. “Cutting back the hours, that’s not really giving us something to do, and that was like a bonding experience for us.”
She also thinks the meal plans should go back to having less meals and more points.
“I never used all 10 meals throughout the week, and I was here weekends,” said Keane. “I feel like increasing it to 17 meals a week, that’s just a little bit extreme.”
Schulz said that he really believes these changes are the best options out of all those that were presented, and mentioned that if anyone has any concerns or feedback, his door is always open to students.