Meal Plans at CWRU

Potential Solutions

This chapter will examine some potential solutions that would make the meal plan cheaper for students and leave them and their families with less debt from already sky-high tuition rates. The difficulty in adressing this problem is the fact that CWRU relies on the profits from the meal plans to fund multiple areas in the university.

According to an article written by Anastazia Vaniskon in 2014, the profits of the meal plan are budgeted into four parts:
  1. ~35% goes to the purchase of food from local producers and farmers
  2. ~35% goes to the salaries of Bon Appetit employees as well as CWRU employees
  3. ~20-25% goes back into the university from new and upcoming projects/goals
  4. ~10-5% goes to miscellaneous payments such as brochures and costs
The goal is to identify solutions which would maximize the amount of money saved for the student without sacrificing massive amounts of profit for the University and Bon Appetit. Regardless, any solution would take away from the profits, however there are approximately three solutions which could minimize the amount of money if enacted. They are:
  1. Lower the Cost of the Meal Plan
  2. Remove Meal Plan Requirements
  3. Refund Unused Meal Swipes
All three of these solutions need the approval of the Executives at CWRU as well as the combined effort of many employees that contribute to the budgeting and management of the current meal plans. Now on to analyzing each solution.

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