As Food Prices Rise, Cost of Campus Meal Plans Going Up

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 01:05:00 GMT

College students may see a sharp spike in the cost of their on-campus meal plans this fall, due to rising food prices, according to a story this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Soaring Food Prices Have Campus Dining Halls Squeezed,” May 6, 2008).

Several schools have already announced that they intend to increase their meal-plan prices next year, and it’s likely that many more schools will follow:

• Louisiana State University	7.0% increase
• Clemson University	6.0% increase
• University of Miami	4.5% increase
• Ohio University	3.5% increase

In an attempt to avoid huge deficits and stay within their budgets, college food-service operations across the country are getting creative with their meal plans and coming up with unique solutions to contain their costs.

Louisiana State University, for instance, will focus on reducing the portions of its meals.

At Ohio University, the school will focus on marketing meal plans to off-campus students in an attempt to increase overall revenue. In addition, food-service staff will be baking items like cookies, pizza dough, and rolls, from scratch, instead of using premade products.

Rich Neumann, director of dining services at OU, estimates that baking from scratch will save the school almost $100,000 each year alone.

One of the simpler, if more manipulative methods is the one implemented by Western Washington University for one week last month. The school simply removed trays from the dining halls so that students couldn’t carry as much food.

The strategy worked.

According to the director of WWU’s dining services, the dining halls saw a 34-percent reduction in waste when the institution went trayless.

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How Dirty Could Food Get in Five Seconds on the Floor? Students Ask, Answer and Research Their Own Burning Questions

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Thanks to scientists at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., people can never again drop food on the floor, no matter how fleetingly, and then proceed to put it into their mouths with the gleeful abandon of children, whether or not they believe 13-year-old Christopher Evans’ assertion that “God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt” (The Washington Post, July 8, 2007).

Professor Paul Dawson, who teaches food science at Clemson, has proven that the “five-second rule” that children commonly apply to food dropped on the floor does not make it safe to eat. No matter how quickly dropped morsels are retrieved off the floor or even a countertop, roving bacteria have already had plenty of time to attach themselves. And depending on what kind of bacteria were prowling on those surfaces, those five seconds the food spent out of your hand could make you sick.

While Dawson has been garnering media attention in promoting his stomach-churning results, credit for the idea behind the research and for much of the research itself should be going to Clemson students. It was students in Dawson’s multi-semester undergraduate research course who came up with the idea of testing the five-second rule—the schoolyard maxim that says that as long as you pick up dropped food from a dirty surface within five seconds or less, it’s still totally OK to eat.

Dawson’s research class, “Testing Variables of Foods, Films, Antimicrobials and Surfaces Affecting Transfer and/or Survival of Bacteria,” is just one in a larger set of Clemson classes designed to teach students critical thinking and research skills.

The university’s Creative Inquiry program began in 2005 and “has rapidly grown from about 40 projects with between five and 15 students each in the first semester to 205 this spring,” according to an Inside Higher Ed article by Jennifer Epstein (“Small Group Learning for 14,000 Undergrads,” Aug. 1, 2007). “Administrators hope to eventually expand the program to all of the university’s 14,000 undergraduates.”

Beyond the Five-Second Rule: Bringing Social Services to Campus and Medieval Tales to Life

Creative Inquiry projects stretch from three to four semesters and are typically undertaken by sophomores and juniors. To encourage a sense of student ownership over a project, Creative Inquiry sequences have students work with the same faculty advisor and group of peers until they complete their custom project.

“Projects vary greatly in how they’re taught and how students get involved,” Epstein explains. “Some groups, like Dawson’s food science team, do lab or field research. Others culminate with a final design, like a recent plan to create a child-care center on campus, or with a performance, like one group’s stage adaptation of the 14^th-century Italian work The Decameron, which they eventually staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in Scotland.”

While university officials anticipate 250 Creative Inquiry projects will be underway in the fall, university Provost Doris Helms wants to expand the program to include all undergraduate students. That would mean Clemson would need to offer about 1,000 projects.

Can Creativity Be Forced?

Expanding the Creative Inquiry program to accommodate all Clemson undergraduates could be problematic. There simply aren’t enough professors and other resources to sustain 1,000 specialized student projects. And then there’s the question of what happens when creativity becomes a requirement rather than a choice.

“It’s difficult to manufacture this for everyone,” says Jeff Appling, Clemson’s associate dean of curriculum and the administrator who oversees the program. “Creative Inquiry is truly about scholarship … trying to involve students in the scholarly process for deep study in a subject area or even multidisciplinary research.”

The program has been successful because the students who enroll are there by choice. They’re motivated by their own curiosity and drive. An achievement like the publication of Dawson’s research in the Journal of Applied Microbiology is the culmination of an undertaking by committed, self-starter students who originated and researched their own project.

Still, even if some students were to become less engaged if Creative Inquiry projects were to become a graduation requirement rather than an elective course of study, the program’s innovative approach remains a catalyst for new ideas. Students, as well as faculty members, have multiple semesters to move beyond their textbooks, attack material in depth and apply critical thinking and principles of research to real-world situations.

Not to mention students gain valuable team-building experience when problem solving as part of a group. This experience could help students make the transition from the classroom to the office much more easily.

Now that Clemson students have debunked the five-second myth, as graduates, they could turn their attention to the science and sociology behind the office gossip that takes place at the water cooler.

The student loan advisors at NextStudent are helpful and knowledgeable about student loans. They are a trusted source in getting you the appropriate information about your student loan consolidation, student loan options and helping students get the college financing they need. Go to www.nextstudent.com for more information.

Be sure to tune in next Thursday for my next blog on student loan advice.

Student Loan Girl

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Student Loan Blog : Clemson

As Food Prices Rise, Cost of Campus Meal Plans Going Up

How Dirty Could Food Get in Five Seconds on the Floor? Students Ask, Answer and Research Their Own Burning Questions