Accounting for RPS prices

Don't you wish you could spend your meal points at the Indiana Memorial Union without having to purchase a UnionPlus plan?\nThat might be a possibility for the 2006-2007 year if floated changes in RPS meal plans go through. It sounds great, but things might not be that easy.\nThe high cost of meal plans these days is mainly not because of the University's costs for the actual food but because of overhead costs such as staff salaries and packaging. So when students pay the food courts' notoriously high prices for a meal, more of their money goes toward overhead than toward the meal itself.\nUnder the current setup, a freshman on the cheapest available meal plan pays $2,390 per year. This is a blanket charge where each dollar equals one meal point, with overhead costs included in each "point" or dollar of food. \nRPS's new proposal would separate food and overhead costs. The same student in this instance would pay $956 for 956 meal points and $1,434 for overhead -- in other words, the plan would still cost $2,390. At the same time, the cost of food in dining halls and food courts would go down by 60 percent. So though students would have fewer meal points, the deflation of food prices would allow them to buy the same amount of food as before.\nSo what's the difference?\nNone, essentially. Students will pay the same amount, no matter where each dollar is allotted.\nOne perk of the new plan would be the ability to use all meal points at the Indiana Memorial Union without purchasing any additional points. While the prospect is alluring, there is a major drawback. Unlike the low-priced dining hall food, items at chain restaurants like Burger King and Pizza Hut will probably still be priced the same as they are now. With a drastic reduction in the number of spendable meal points, buying food at the Union would deplete a student's meal points much more quickly than buying food at the residence halls. \nUnder similar plans at other schools, people paying with cash instead of meal points pay the full price of food because they do not contribute to overhead through a separate fee. The plan isn't formalized yet, but the same issues arise whether the percentage is 60-40 or 50-50 between overhead and food costs. \nAs it is now, incoming freshmen and their parents can be upset and confused by the high cost of the required meal plans. If the new plan were to be instated, parents would most likely be confused even more by the fuzzy math.\nThere is hardly a student on campus who is satisfied with the meal plans at this point. Granted, RPS doesn't have the same volume purchasing power as a major grocery store, but this argument doesn't convince students who are forced to buy from RPS anyway when they live in the dorms. The problem isn't where the money is allotted, but the fact that the plans cost so much money. Moving the figures around won't change that, and we're not fooled.