Don't Harvard our Princeton

Recently, the University announced a policy that would require members of eating clubs and co-ops to buy a second meal plan, costing about $900 a year. I, along with all the other members of the Graduate Interclub Council, believe that this policy would be disastrous for Princeton’s undergraduate experience.

First, let’s start with the obvious: it’s wrong to ask people to pay for something that they neither need nor want. If students already have a meal plan, and the University is confident that they are not experiencing food insecurity, then this would be adding an unnecessary burden to students. There is little evidence that there is demand for dining hall meals among eating club members; they were already being given two free meals per week at campus dining halls in the current system and University data provided to the GICC indicated that less than one of them were used on average.

Second, this policy will create financial stress for many students. While the University graciously offered to pay for these plans for students already on financial aid, they will not support anyone else. This creates a problem for the surprisingly large part of the Princeton community who do not qualify for aid, but who still have significant financial burdens. I’ve met many of these students, whose families often come from high cost-of-living areas or who have significant medical expenses. Many of them need to make ends meet via loans or additional jobs. This policy will lead many of them to drop out of their eating clubs, further stratifying the campus into haves and have-nots.

Finally, and perhaps most worrisome, this policy gives the University a beachhead to incrementally weaken the eating club system over time. They may require a $900 plan this year, but maybe next year it will be a $2000 plan or a $5000 plan; they may cover the costs for all students on financial aid now, but maybe next year they will cover only half these students or none at all. It’s no secret that Princeton’s administrators have never felt completely comfortable sharing control of campus life with private institutions (despite our many benefits). From Wilson’s efforts to rein in the clubs a century ago, to Tilghman and Eisgruber’s more modern unease with their social role on campus, University leaders have consistently sought to limit the influence of eating clubs, and this policy could give them the means to slowly replace them with dining halls.

The GICC has proposed sensible alternatives. The University could simply make this second meal plan optional, and let students decide for themselves if they need it. Alternatively, if the University has conviction that these dining hall meals are important to undergraduate life, then it should continue giving all upperclassmen two free meals at the dining halls. Some back of the envelope math: 3000 upperclassmen x 72% in clubs and co-ops x 30% not on aid x $900 means the University is proposing to collect $583k in revenue from students who already have a meal plan, which seems inconsequential to their $3B operating budget.

Even the cost of this plan is absurd! $900 equates to roughly $14 per meal if students utilize every single one of them throughout the year. As mentioned earlier, eating club members use less than half of their two free meals per week on average right now, so Princeton would effectively be charging them more than $28 per meal. For comparison, Charter Club budgets about $10 per meal (for more scrumptious food than the dining halls, thank you very much), so it seems like the University is trying to stick students with the bill for their own operational inefficiencies.

If this policy moves forward as it is currently written, then the University could artificially reduce demand for eating clubs such that only a fraction of them are financially viable. In this nightmare scenario, only a select few students would be part of the remaining clubs. This would make Princeton look more like Harvard or Yale, whose social scene is defined by a handful of elitist finals clubs and exclusionary secret societies.

And why should Princeton emulate the second best school of Cambridge, Massachusetts? There’s something magical about our existing formula of having so many student-run dining options on campus. In each eating club and co-op, members slowly adapt the organization to their needs and the end result is that they become better suited for their constituents than a large, centrally administered dining hall ever could. This cultivates a sense of ownership and a strong feeling of community that their members cannot find elsewhere on campus. The evidence backs this up: in the 2024 dining survey by the Huron Consulting Group, eating club and co-op members reported a higher satisfaction than any other cut of the surveyed population.

For anyone who has been part of an eating club or co-op, it’s obvious why these numbers look the way that they do. Personally, my eating club was the most consequential part of my Princeton experience, and those two-and-a-half years resulted in lifelong friendships that I cannot imagine my adult life without. I know that countless other alumni feel the same way about their own clubs. So if it ain’t broke, then why is the University trying to fix it?

We urge the University to stop imposing their own vision of an idealized dining experience on students who are already happy. If they keep going down this path, their Harvard-like centralization of dining will asphyxiate these great institutions, and we will quickly find that their one-size-fits-all solution is actually one-size-fits-no-one.

If you are an alum, we hope you join us in letting the administration know your displeasure.