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With tuition and fees at 153% of the national average for private, American, four-year universities, the University of Rochester is one of the most expensive undergraduate educations. At a less than 40% acceptance rate, and given the university’s recent recognition, you’re also getting a whole boat-load of education and the opportunity to make at least a few connections.
Queue “Gripe Time”:
After taking a few years away from my studies to play in the sand and rocks in Afghanistan and having come back and changed majors at least nine times, I’ve been around the block a few times and each trip is more confusing than the last. The same questions haunt me every year, and the complaints of the undergraduates have seemed to increase over time; “If we are so great, why do we do so many silly things”?
Queue examples:
The Go Green Initiative:
- Watering plants after a six-hour rain storm.
- Leaving all television monitors and lights on in buildings which were closed and locked at 5pm.
- Waste collection bins in the tunnels specifically for paper, metal, or plastic without an accompanying general waste bin.
Dining Services:
- Tiered dining plan with the option to purchase an “unlimited” or a discrete number of meals at varying prices.
- Aramark
- Staffing
Facilities and Housekeeping:
- Over-employment
- Lack of quality-assurance/loss-prevention
Queue rant:
This week’s market failure is dining services. I really like the idea of having unlimited access to meal services while enrolled at the University. UofR students do certainly think of themselves as either the best and therefore deserving of such, or are at least of the opinion that if they’re paying a few thousand dollars for a meal plan, that they would prefer to eat whenever and however much they please. Whether or not this is the case doesn’t particularly matter when playing the back of the envelope numbers game, but it is interesting no less.
Unlimited meal plans cost quite a bit more than those with a finite dollar amount, but there is no system for regulating admission. These meal plans, while identified with the swipe of an ID card are impossible to properly administer. Now, to be clear, my concern here is passively directed towards the university. My peeve is that students are being unfairly charged because the plan is based on a consumption aggregation model (i.e. the assumption is that the costs to feed one bird versus one bear for a single time period are so similar, that the cost differential becomes negligible and both can be charged the mean value of the provided goods and services). Cost increases due to economic inefficiency are always passed to the consumer. I find myself hard pressed to imagine how meal plan prices will be fairly allocated given the number of students who can use their ID, pass it to their 10 friends behind them, and go on about their day without so much as a 1 minute refractory period. One might guess that unlimited-plan prices would increase substantially, in order to hedge against this revenue loss. It may also occur to some that we may see a vendor-convenience fee on finitely valued plans in order to meet Dining Services’ bottom line. In either case, students lose and they lose because of the inadequacies of an already broken system.
