Oregon State University encourages you to purchase a meal plan by giving you a discount at all of their on campus dining halls. But, you can not use your meal plan money at every food stop on campus. This can be confusing to first-year students who don’t know anything about Oregon State. They could go to somewhere like Java II and try to use their meal plan to pay for it only to find out that they have to either use Orange Cash or real money. All of the other restaurants that you can find in OSU’s Memorial Union are also not covered by the meal plan So, to fix this problem, OSU could expand what their meal plan covers.
Currently, the only places that are covered by the meal plan are all they major dining halls(West, Arnold, and McNary) and Bing’s at Weatherford Hall. To expand this, they could have all of the restaurants that can be found on campus covered by the meal plan. This would give on-campus students more variety in the places that they could go to eat at. This would also give the meal plan more value cause you can eat at real food places like Panda Express and Togos. The volume of students that purchase a meal plan would also increase. This would help both OSU and all of OSU’s students. First year students that are required to buy a meal plan wouldn’t feel like they are limited by the food that is served by the three main dining halls. OSU would then benefit because increasing the selection of food means that it will attract more students to purchase a meal plan and also it would increase the amount that first-year on campus students would purchase so that they could eat more of their meals on campus versus having to go off campus for some of their meals on the weekends.
Expanding the meal plan would not only help the students of Oregon State University but it would also help Oregon State university as a whole by giving students more variety in what is covered and by giving more money to OSU.
