Quick summary for those who don’t have the time to read the detailed explanation:

You spend at least $1830 per term.

per term. This is the absolute BEST case scenario.

case scenario. That’s at least $9.40 per Meal Swipe if you use all of them every week.

if you use all of them every week. Your meal plan provides at most 207 meals per term including Dining Dollars.

including Dining Dollars. It takes 252 meals per term to eat breakfast lunch and dinner every day.

You could eat 252 meals per term at only Drexel Dining Locations, if you instead had the 1830.00$ in cash.

This is all assuming you don’t spend any money on drinks.

Full text explanation of the process and reasoning:

Drexel University requires every Freshman student that lives on campus to have one of three available meal plans. At first glance that doesn’t seem unreasonable, but once you delve into some of the details it becomes simply ridiculous that they can get away with it at all.

For the purposes of my explanation, I’m going to simply use the Blue Plan, as its the most common one on campus, and quite frankly the difference between the blue, gold and platinum plan is superficial at best. So lets start: (All of my sources come from their own website http://www.drexelcampusdining.com/plans.html)

The blue plan is $1830 per term. Lets first math this out in the most generous way possible. First, we subtract $475 from the $1830 because that money is only usable at Northside (Subway, Currito, Chik-fil-a) and seven other locations on campus, four of which are coffee shops. So that leaves us with $1355 that goes toward paying for Meal Swipes.

On a quick aside, Meal Swipes are usable at either The Handschumacher Dining Center or at the TakeThree option in Northside. Lets for now ignore the fact that the amount of food in a single take three is pitiful, because as of yet, we don’t know how much real money each meal swipe translates to. So, $1355 in Meal Swipes for 1 term. How long is one term? Really, one term at Drexel is 11 weeks, 10 weeks of classes, 1 week of finals. But lets be generous, lets say that the Dining Center is also open during the break period between terms, which to be fair it sometimes is with reduced hours, so that would make it 12 weeks in total. So lets see then, 12 Meal Swipes per week, for 12 weeks, as I’ve said, is our generous estimate, works out to 144 meals term. So our $1355 is divided between 144 meals, which works out to $9.41 dollars per meal.

Now $9.41 doesn’t seem bad at all per meal, and 12 meals per week is enough to have two meals every day from the Hans, on almost every day of the week (Two meals per day would require 14 Meal Swipes per week). Well, I guess lets just ignore that a healthy diet includes more than 2 meals per day every day. Maybe you can make that up in the $475 at Northside?

Not exactly. If you assume that the average person ideally should eat three meals per day, we quickly see that that that is not possible on the Drexel Diet. Over the course of 12 weeks, there are 84 days, if you want to eat 3 meals per day, that would require having 252 meals during the term. As you probably remember from earlier, you only get 144 Meal Swipes, so that leaves 108 meals left to make up for out of the 475 Dining Dollars you get at the beginning of the term. But a-ha! It’s entirely possible to eat those 108 meals if you only spend $4.30 per meal! So lets take a quick look at what you can get at Northside for under 4.30$…

OR

200-250 empty calories. Yum. What a meal.

So what would be a realistic meal from Northside? Well, 1 Currito bowl is about $7.00, and is probably the most expensive single meal item, barring any subway foot long, which is about $7.50. So that works out to approximately, 63 subway meals, or 67 Currito meals. Neither of those added up with the Meal Swipes adds up to the recommended 3 meals per day, or 252 meals in total per term. Maybe it’s just not possible to eat 3 meals per day on $1830 per term?

Well, about that… if you divide out the amount of money that the meal plan costs into a weekly groceries bill, it works out to $152 a week, or $608 per month. This is for a single student, not supporting anyone else. There are families of three or four who do not spend that much on groceries per month living within 10 blocks of our dorms.

However, if you don’t want to cook your own food and eat out all the time, there’s an even more fun way to see this. If you want to eat the full 252 meals per term, on $1830, you would have $7.27 to spend per meal, or $21.78 per day. Which, ironically, is enough to eat the full 252 meals per term, while still only eating at Drexel Campus Dining Locations. Don’t believe me?

If you simply go to the Hans for breakfast, which is $7.00 for guests (not the $9.41 students effectively pay), this leaves you $14.78 the rest of the day. You could then spend that on a foot-long Subway sandwich for around 7.50$, which covers lunch. And then finally for dinner, you could treat yourself to a custom Currito bowl, or wrap, either of which would fit your remaining budget of $7.28.

Keeping in mind that this was the ABSOLUTE BEST case scenario for pricing. In my next post I’m going to detail a more realistic and true to student life cost assessment.