Author: Ryan Strong
Recently, Occidental College’s Campus Dining Department realized it had a problem. Student surveys put Occidental food on the low end of a “value” metric compared to other institutions. Most people would confront a problem like this in a very common sense way: they would work to reduce wasteful overhead, try to lower the amount of meal plan money that gets siphoned off into the general budget and reduce food costs all in an effort to lower prices and deliver better value.
But Occidental chose a very different route. Instead of it being a problem of actual value, the college claims that the only problem that led to these survey results is students’ inability to properly do “value perception.” The college then settled on a system called Base Cost Reduction to help improve value perception.
Base Cost Reduction simply takes away half of the money students pay into the meal plan at the start of the semester and then gives them everything they buy at 50 percent off the price it is today. Supposedly, students respond better to this in surveys. But the fact is the money one loses at the start and the discount cancel each other out and we’re left with a proposal that advocates for a change that is only focused on perceptions and does nothing to make campus dining more affordable.
Student will still, for example, pay two dollars for their organic piece of fruit at the Marketplace. It’s just that they would have already paid one of those dollars at the start of the semester and thus will only owe one dollar from their meal plan account at the time of purchase.
The college claims that splitting up the base cost or the overhead costs from the actual price of each item allows students to better understand where the money is going and allows students to be charged prices similar to what they see in stores, which makes them perceive better value. The truth is that the system just makes students feel better because half of the money they’re paying for the food service is skimmed off the top of the meal plan in one swoop. It turns out that is a little less depressing than being reminded on a daily basis how high prices are when students pick up their $4 Naked Juice.
The college should take a balanced approach to this problem. The base cost reduction element can stay if it is paired with some marginal, reasonable changes that will increase actual value. Start with a five percent reduction in the “return,” or the arbitrary amount of meal plan money given to the college’s general fund. The college can make up that lost revenue by cutting waste in its central administration. Then, commit to a five percent reduction in food service specific overhead costs. The committee dealing with this proposal can decide on the cuts that would have the least impact not just on students but on the college as a whole, including its hardworking line cooks and kitchen assistants. These reforms would concretely lower prices, not just students’ perceptions.
A balanced approach to tackling both actual and perceptual value should have been pursued all along. The claim that the research shows that the only problem is “value perception,” makes me want to see this research in its entirety and whether it truly captured both the cost of the meal plans at peer institutions (widely available) and the prices at those schools for similar items to what is served in the Marketplace (not as widely available). It is pretty convenient to peg this problem solely on students and their “value perception,” and the committee on this ought to go through and make sure it asked the hard, uncomfortable questions that can potentially uncover more of the story.
Even if the research checks out, striving to improve actual value is still a worthy goal. When students’ money is spent paying administrators to do dozens of hours of research on improving perceptions in a bid to increase survey results, it seems reasonable for students to ask that the college consider ways to concretely improve affordability, quality and/or variety for students as part of that process. The committee working on this process should include some reasonable reforms to actual value as an addendum to the proposal in order to craft a more balanced solution.
Ryan Strong is a junior politics major. He can be reached at rstrong@oxy.edu.
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