The cost of college is often thought of primarily as the cost of tuition. This makes sense, since it varies more than any other cost. Tuition may vary by tens of thousands of dollars between different schools, so choosing a school with cheaper tuition is an obvious way to reduce total cost and thereby minimize or avoid any debt.
But there are many other expenses that add up as well. The cost of room and board to live in a dormitory is another large expense. The cheapest way to pay for living expenses is to continue living at home while in college. Assuming you go to community college, and assuming you have a good enough relationship with your parents to stay with them a bit longer, and assuming that they won’t charge you any rent yet, because they know you have minimal income while attending college, this is obviously and easily the best way to save money on your college living expenses.
This may simply not be feasible for everyone, or for the entire time you are in college.
Like one Someday Wise back in the 1980’s, you may be determined to get away from your childhood as soon as possible, and willing to pay the price of doing so. Residential college offers the promise of “the traditional experience” of being immersed in a living-learning community that offers growth beyond the subject matter shared in the classroom.
A lot of Americans desire the residential college experience almost as much as the degree itself, and cannot really imagine pursuing advanced education without it. In fact, many if not most 4-year colleges require that students live in college housing, at least for their first year, and some for longer. I’m here to tell you about a few hacks to reduce the price tag.
Room-and-board typically averages (as of 2023) about $12,000 per year for a dorm room and cafeteria plan, but lots of new luxury options can jack that up substantially. Instead of sharing a double room with a communal bathroom down a long hallway, there are private rooms in apartments, sometimes with ensuite baths. Which do you think costs more? Sometimes there is flexibility in the food plan you purchase with a potentially wide range of pricing options.
It may feel like no big deal to upgrade a little here and a little there. But it should feel like a big deal. Every thousand dollars you can reduce your costs today, translates into lower payments, for fewer years, in the future. Your choice of room type and your choice of meal plan (or not) can be a major factor in your final college debt total, even if you got a spectacular tuition discount.
Back in Someday’s time, if you chose to live in a dorm, most colleges and universities required that you also purchase the meal plan, and many still do. It was often the same for everyone, and included (expensive) unlimited meals in the cafeterias. At the big university I attended, exactly one dorm offered a room-only option, and, being financially challenged and under pressure from my parents to reduce expenses, I chose it.
You were supposed to put down your first, second, and third choice of dorm, and I just didn’t. This was a deal-breaker for us. If we had to add the extra cost of the mandatory, unlimited dining plan, Someday Wise was OUT, and settling for the backup plan of community college back home. Even back in the 1980’s, the meal plan was quite expensive, costing more than the room itself.
Linebackers who visited the dining hall several times daily, and who could put away four cheeseburgers for lunch, paid the same price for the same unlimited plan as people who had a bagel for breakfast each morning and ordered pizza from Domino’s four times a week. What I did, was find my way to a grocery store once a week, had a mini fridge in my room, and ate a lot of sandwiches. We had a community kitchen on my floor, but I rarely used it.
Nowadays some schools offer flexible plans with lower or higher price points so you can pay only for exactly what you will use. In some cases, you can forego the cafeteria plans entirely and feed yourself.
You may think that school cafeteria food is an obvious best, most nutritious, and most convenient choice for a busy student, but Someday is not buying that reasoning. After spending 2 years on the room only plan, I became a resident advisor and finally was admitted to the cafeteria. This is how people gain the infamous Freshman 15. You got to enter 3 times per day, and once in, you could eat until someone had to carry you out. Essentially the cafeteria was equivalent to eating every meal at Golden Corral; unlimited quantity, reasonable variety, acceptable but institutional quality, a tendency to overeat and spend too much time in the dining hall. And then there is the inevitable – the meals, perhaps few, perhaps many, that college students choose to eat with their friends, outside of the cafeteria, that they pay money for.
Let me make something clear right here. Someday Wise is nobody’s dietician, and she does not in any way endorse any eating plan (certainly not the one outlined above), health lifestyle, or anything else related to medical type advice.
Talk to your doctor, and all of that, before you decide what kind of nutrition belongs in your body. For better or worse, (mostly worse), I grew up on a heavily processed, carb heavy diet, and so did a lot of the people around me. Regardless of what’s on offer at the cafeteria, many people are accustomed to, and may even prefer, that kind of sustenance. Even healthy eaters often find themselves chipping in with friends and roommates for delivery grub on at least an occasional basis.
If you fit into that general model, and plan to continue with it, you may save some money by buying it at all on your own, rather than paying the premium price for the cafeteria.
“No, no, no, Someday,” you might be protesting, “my student is an accomplished, self-taught junior chef with mad prep skills, a new world paleo vegan with a sprout garden on the kitchen windowsill and a keen understanding of the protein profile of ancient grains. They will be able to consistently make good choices in the cafeteria.”
That just sounds to me all the more reason to be doing your own cooking.
I find that at many college websites, it’s difficult to find prices for the various dining plans. Many of them are contracted out to food service vendors, who list what you get with your plan, but not how much you are paying for it!
Full dining plans typically (2023) run between $5,000 and $6,500 for the academic year. If the meal plan is optional, or if you can choose a limited dining plan (i.e. one meal per day instead of 3) for a significant discount, it may be worth considering. If you figure an average grocery cost of $150-300 per month per person (per several sources on a Google search), and the students are usually on campus for two 4-month semesters, even at the high end the cost of food is only $2400.
There are, of course, other factors. There is convenience – who has time to shop and prepare meals when you’re supposed be studying and adjusting to life away from the comfort of your childhood home? Are stores and kitchens even available? There is the social ritual of trooping over to the cafeteria daily with your posse and pondering life’s problems over baked spaghetti and meatballs. There is, finally, the cost of these groceries I keep pushing. They aren’t free, either, and if the only place to buy them is at a convenience store, any potential savings may be quickly erased.
I found that I quickly tired of the cafeteria when it was included in my Resident Advisor compensation, but being thrifty of course I used it as long as I had it. I definitely did not like it more than my prior room only plan, which had worked out fabulously for me.
HACK ALERT: Many students have a part time job while in college. What if I told you, at some schools, if you choose to have said job at the dining hall, you might also get meals for FREE? You might be able to skip the paid plan entirely, get a hot meal included whenever you work a shift, and start building that resume, all at the same time. This is a real thing, and it is not uncommon.
There are many resources available online by searching “ways to save money on college food” that can help with the ultimate decision. Several articles give tips to manage a budget if you go it alone.
And so, the pesky arithmetic of budgeting must come into play for each, well, player in this game. Meal plans, particularly partial plans, can be a sensible option for those who choose to live in a dorm. If you do buy one, use it fully. Don’t let those points go unspent, and if you have a full plan, sorry, but you shouldn’t be ordering pizza with your friends. More on this below.
For others, a food plan may be less than ideal, an outright poor choice, or an utter waste of precious resources. If nothing else, I urge you, beg you, to use those smart brain cells you have, the ones that are driving you toward college in the first place, and look for ways to save on food while in college. Whether it’s living at home and eating your parents’ food, living on or near campus with or without a school-sponsored meal plan, working for the caf so they have to feed you, look for ways to save.
The fact is, there are almost always ways to save, even if only modestly. Even if your only reasonable option is to live on campus with a full meal plan, you can still save by fully using the plan, forbidding yourself from cheating by purchasing unnecessary meals (including but not limited to pizza) outside of the plan. An extra $10 here or there may not seem like a big deal, but if you’re already taking on any kind of debt to attend college, you should do anything possible to avoid unnecessary expenses.
Let’s do a quick exercise. Let’s say you get stuck with a full meal plan and its massive price tag, because it’s the school’s rules. Maybe that choice of school saved you money in other ways, such as an award of full tuition, with nothing for room and board, which you are required to purchase. Okay. Sunk costs. I’m not even going to worry about whether the meal plan cost you $3,000 per year or $6,000 per year. It’s no longer negotiable in our example, and if you took on loans to pay for it, we’ll deal with that in future posts.
Let’s say you limit yourself to a mere twenty cheat meals per year, at a cost of $10 each, outside of your plan. That’s only about two meals per month, and a cost of $200 per year, or $800 for all four years. If your loan interest rate is 6.8% and you choose a 30 year repayment plan, over time you will pay back $1,870 dollars JUST for those twice-per-month meals. More than double the actual cost of the meal.
That’s 359 monthly payments of over $5 per month. I realize that sounds like a small amount, but 359 payments is a LOT of monthly payments. When you hit your 18th birthday you have only lived 216 months. Some people don’t even live for 359 more months after college, unfortunately. And this is all on top of whatever loans you needed to take out to buy the full meal plan in the first place. So even the effort to reduce your expenses modestly can make your future financial life much less painful and for a shorter duration.
Don’t try to tell me that those few cheat meals are okay because your parents or other benefactors provide an allowance, or because you make a few bucks from your campus or summer job. Those arguments are valid only, possibly, if you are taking on no debt whatsoever, to attend college. Even then, you should not be blowing that money on meals you already paid for once, albeit in the boring cafeteria, because it’s poor financial management.
If you have a source of income while attending school, you should either use it for actual needs like laundry and shampoo and toothpaste, save it for emergencies that cannot be foreseen, or put it toward the non-negotiable costs of your education, thereby reducing your overall loan balance right now, before you spend years watching all that interest add up. If you’re not blowing it all, you can save that money so that it’s sitting there at graduation, ready to help you on your journey (you’ll need it) and to help with those first payments.
Do not consider meal plans an inevitable expense of college. Be creative, look at overall costs, and try to determine whether it’s an opportunity to save in your unique situation. Mindful spending now will train you for good money management skills in the future and reduce your financial burden years and years into your future life.
Have a nice day!
Someday Wise 