Katya Agrawal, Contributing Photographer

Most undergraduates have the option to transfer some of their dining hall meal swipes at other on-campus dining spots, such as Steep Cafe and the Schwarzman Center’s Commons and The Bow Wow. 

But three students told the News they feel that food pricing and meal plan inconsistencies have left them hungry for better options. 

At The Bow Wow and Steep Cafe, a lunchtime transfer allows students to purchase up to $10 worth of food. However, the value of a dining hall meal swipe is $5.50 for continental breakfast, $7.50 for hot breakfast, $13.50 for lunch and $17 for dinner, according to a Benjamin Franklin College dining hall worker who spoke with the News. 

Looking at the full cost and number of swipes available to students on the “full” meal plan — which is required for first-year students — the News calculated that should a student begin swiping on Aug. 20 and eat three dining hall meals a day for the fall semester, excluding the October and November recesses, they would spend an average of $12.55 per swipe, which roughly aligns with the Franklin dining hall employee’s comments.

“The Bow Wow is effectively useless to me,” Carter Dewees ’25 told the News. “I will never voluntarily eat lunch at The Bow Wow because you can get sushi [and] maybe a bag of chips, and that’s your entire lunch. I don’t know how that’s in the same ballpark as an all-you-can-eat buffet at 14 residential colleges.” 

Yale Hospitality offers undergraduate students three meal plan options: the Full Meal Plan, which costs $4,140 and is required for all first-year students, the Flex Meal Plan and the Connect Meal Plan. The Full Meal Plan includes 21 meal swipes per week, while the equally priced Flex Meal Plan gives students 14 swipes per week and 300 dining points — the equivalent of $300 which can be spent at the dining halls, The Bow Wow, the Elm and other Yale Hospitality retail locations — per semester. All students living on campus are required to purchase either the Full or Flex plan.

The Connect Meal Plan, which costs less than half the price of the Full and Flex Meal Plans at $1,575, is available for students living off campus. This plan provides students with five swipes per week, as well as 30 bonus swipes and 100 dining points which can be used throughout the semester. 

Students on the Full Meal Plan have five lunch transfers per week, while students on the Flex Meal Plan have three. 

Pilar Bylinsky ’25, who is on the Flex Meal Plan, said she rarely visits The Bow Wow because of the $10 lunch transfer value. She said that she struggles to purchase a “filling” meal within the price limit, especially because The Bow Wow’s food is “significantly overpriced.”

Yale Hospitality did not reply to questions about the inconsistent dining swipe values and differences between meal plans and declined to comment on this story overall.

Last school year, Sophia Burick ’25 ate lunch in Steep Cafe every day as she had morning classes and afternoon research both on Science Hill, which she said was far from any of the residential college dining halls. At the time, she was on the Full Meal Plan, but she is now on the Connect plan.

“It’s ridiculous the amount of food that $10 is at Steep,” she said. “I wanted to do Connect this year [because] last year when I was doing my meal transfer to Steep, I would be starving every day … I’m vegetarian [so] pretty much all I could eat there [was] a grilled cheese or the vegetarian sushi, which is literally 250 calories and nine dollars.”

Both Bylinsky and Burick questioned why the Flex Meal Plan restricts students to three lunch transfers at Commons, The Bow Wow and Steep Cafe per week, whereas students on the Full Meal Plan have five lunch transfers per week. 

Burick speculated that this difference could be an effort by Yale Hospitality to reduce the “insane” lines at Steep Cafe, especially during lunchtime. However, Bylinsky guessed that this difference may be because Commons’ food — which the Schwarzman Center boasts is “chef-tested” — is “worth more” than meals in the dining halls.

Additionally, Bylinsky and Burick said they were unsure why students on the Flex Meal Plan receive 10 guest swipes per semester, while those on the Full Meal Plan have five guest swipes. Burick said that she thinks the reason might be because only upperclassmen, who might need to use guest swipes on more of their friends than underclassmen, can select the Flex Meal Plan.

“Maybe they have off-campus friends that don’t have as many meal swipes as them, either [because they] don’t have a dining plan or are on Connect and ran out of their meals,” she said. “It seems pretty weird to build that cost into your dining plan for the year, that you would be subsidizing other people’s meals.”

All three students the News interviewed also spoke about changes to the meal plans they would like to see in the future.

Bylinsky said that because breakfast is held in just three of the 14 residential colleges over the weekends, students might only be eating brunch and dinner on Saturdays and Sundays. This, Bylinsky said, would mean that those students on the Full plan who skip weekend breakfast would be paying for 21 meals per week while consuming only 19.

“It’d be nice if we could somehow opt out of paying for breakfast on the weekends,” she told the News. “I feel like only athletes or people who wake up really early eat breakfast on the weekends.”

Burick said she wishes that she could convert some of her 30 bonus meal swipes from the Connect Meal Plan into extra dining points, which are “more versatile” than meal swipes.

Additionally, Bylinsky said she thinks that Yale Hospitality should lower The Bow Wow’s prices or increase the lunch transfer value so that students can purchase more food with their swipe. 

Dewees told the News that his biggest concern is the lack of consistency in meal swipe values across Yale Hospitality’s various dining halls, restaurants and cafes.

“They need to give us a dollar value for the swipe,” Dewees said. “I don’t understand how a swipe could be $10 in one place, $15 in another, [$17] in another … Anyone can walk in and buy a $15 meal at Commons — it’s open to the public. Why can’t we spend $15 in The Bow Wow if that is how much a meal from Yale Hospitality is worth?”

The Yale Schwarzman Center, which houses Commons, opened in 2021 after a four-year renovation project.