The Freshman Minus-15: Students at UC San Diego Are Kept in a Perpetual State of Hunger by the School's Draconian Dining Hall Policy

UC San Diego is one university where the normal rules of college life do not apply.

At most institutions of higher learning, a students' first year on campus is devoted primarily to 1) eating, 2) partying, 3) drinking, and 4) eating some more. However, at UCSD, tucked into the ritzy coastal suburb of La Jolla, items 1 and 4 seem to have been omitted from the freshman orientation packet. Instead of gorging themselves on doubled helpings of Salisbury steak and late-night pizza at the dining hall, freshmen at UCSD find themselves surviving on two self-prepared bowls of Easy Mac and Cup Noodles per day.

Parents (this writer's included) are shocked to see their kids come home for Thanksgiving looking like they've spent the last three months in one of those "secret" CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. The freshman 15 is a staple of first-year college life, but at this otherwise idyllic campus, that extra poundage only goes out the back, not in through the front.

This phenomenon might come as a pleasant surprise to America's increasingly large contingent of healthy eating advocates, who spend so much time railing against the bad dietary habits of today's youth in between sips of V-8 and bites of organically grown Styrofoam, but it is anything but desirable. UCSD students, rather than overeating their way to premature love handles, are putting themselves through something even less healthy: self-imposed hunger strikes. Why?

The answer lies in the university's Draconian dining plan, which makes healthy eating, if not eating in general, financially impossible. Most colleges offer an "all you can eat" dining plan: Students purchase a specific number of meals per week, and are given unlimited access to the dining hall's food once they swipe in (meals are usually deducted electronically on the student's I.D. card, much like withdrawing from debit card). It encourages students to pace their visits to the cafeteria, but also to eat substantial, filling meals when they're there. Hour-long lunches and dinners with multiple trips back to the buffet line are not uncommon.

UCSD's dining plan is entirely different, and not at all for the better. Students here are given 1,800 "dining dollars" upon arriving on campus, to use throughout the school year. Food at the dining halls is purchased on a per-item basis. What's wrong with this exactly?

The price of the food. With $1,800 to budget for the entire year, students are expected to spend about $8 a day on dining hall meals. This would be fine if the prices were similar to that of a high school cafeteria, but the menus at UCSD read more like those found at Hometown Buffet. The following is a list of what one would typically eat on a school day, and the corresponding approximate costs of the items at Café Ventanas, one of the six UCSD dining halls:

Breakfast: Belgian waffle ($2.95), bowl of fruit ($1.25), orange juice ($1.30)

Lunch: Deli sandwich ($4.50), bag of chips ($0.99), fountain drink ($1.15)

Dinner: Daily entrée with sides ($5.95), fountain drink ($1.15)

A day's worth of food at UCSD will cost you about $20, and that's not counting the snacks that a normal college student inevitably needs throughout the day to stay awake in those 3 p.m. biology lectures. So, spending $20 per day, 7 days a week, a student at UCSD will burn through their $1,800 budget in 90 days. That's about one-third of the school year.

The kids figure out pretty quickly that, unless they want to be literally starving by mid-January, a little bit of cutting back is needed. Full, healthy meals are replaced with the aforementioned Easy Mac bowls, and water is consumed in place of orange juice and milk. Many of them skip breakfast entirely, opting to swallow a multivitamin instead. By the time finals week rolls around, UCSD freshmen are, sometimes literally, shells of their former selves. This is especially true for the boys, who often need over 3,000 calories daily just to maintain their body weight.

Politicians and advocacy groups today make a lot of noise about the soaring cost of tuition and textbooks for public university students. Maybe they should also focus on the other ridiculous money-grabbing schemes out there in the land of higher education, like the dining plan at UCSD. This is an S.O.S. We're starving out here. Send help. A cargo full plane of T.V. dinners would be nice. Call it the "La Jolla Air Lift."