At Oberlin, you have two main dining options, the most common of which is the meal-swipe system where you pay upfront at the beginning of the semester for a set number of meals, tied directly to your Oberlin ID. I believe the term “meal swipes” comes from the time when your ID was a physical card you had to swipe, as opposed to a digital interface. This year, in response to students sometimes burning through all their swipes before the end of the semester, the College has instituted a new policy limiting the amount of meals in a given week. The swipes then reset at the end of each week. 

Largely due to my own personal sleep schedule, I never use meal swipes for breakfast. I buy muffins at Walmart and keep those in my room for a quick bite before I head out to my first class of the day. I haven’t had breakfast in a dining hall since my very first week as a first-year. I also don’t take advantage of Fourth Meal either, so I only ever have two full meals a day, on average. I am also signed up for the Gold Meal Plan, which gives me a maximum allowance of 21 meal swipes a week. As a result, I personally never have had to worry about not having enough meal swipes. 

I say all this to establish that Oberlin College’s new meal swipe policy is not a problem that directly affects me at all. Combine that with the fact that I am, to be blunt, not very “plugged-in” socially, and I should be completely unaware of any controversy whatsoever. But multiple times in the past few weeks, I’ve seen people around me struggle with their meal swipes, which is not something I remember seeing last year. This is, admittedly, just my anecdotal experience. But if I am noticing this problem, then odds are every other student has already noticed it. 

Here’s an example of why students are confused and frustrated with this new system: While I was writing this article, I wondered to myself, “Wait, if the meal swipes are reset at the end of each week … what day is that, exactly? Is Friday the end of the week or Sunday?” I didn’t know the answer to that question, and neither did my roommate. I visited both the Oberlin College and AVI Foodsystems websites and couldn’t find an answer there either. 

Even if the answer to my questions does exist somewhere online, I shouldn’t have to struggle to track it down. That information is very relevant to how people use the current system, so it should be easy to find. But it’s not. The administration has pushed a brand-new idea on the student body without considering how to properly inform people about its mechanics. 

So, what could the College administration do to help students? Well, an in-depth explainer could be a useful resource for students with a meal plan who have questions about the system. I would suggest making it an informational video and forcing students to watch it. As students, we’re already required to watch videos about topics like cybersecurity and proper consent, so a video about the changes to the meal plan system would fit right in. 

It doesn’t even need to be impressively edited! The video on the Oberlin website explaining how to register for class in Banner is very informative without being at all flashy or expensive. It would not be that hard to make something at that level. 

The new system is an admirable attempt by the administration to deal with a real problem where students begin to run out of swipes toward the end of the semester. And I do think that this system could be genuinely useful, if information about how it works was made more easily accessible to the student body. I hope that these critiques are taken into consideration as the semester continues.