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Every Friday night at Colorado State University, a familiar ritual unfolds: Students scramble to use their remaining meal swipes before the system resets. Maybe it means an extra drink, a late-night market snack or topping off friends for the weekend. The reason is simple: The weekly meal plan clock ends at midnight, and unused swipes vanish.
Here’s how the system works at CSU: Housing and Dining Services offers weekly meal plan packages, such as “Any 19” or “Any 15” meals per week. The week begins Saturday morning and ends Friday night; any meals not used by then do not roll over into the next week. Students can also get $200 in RamCash per semester and 10 “flexible bonus meals” for guests or overflow use. But the key point stands: If you don’t use your allotted swipes in that defined week, they’re gone. You paid for them, you used some of them and the rest simply expire.
That system may seem rigid, but it’s also unfair and misaligned with CSU’s values. Behind this policy are real student lives — balancing academics, jobs, transportation and finances, all while trying to ensure they have enough to eat.
The scale of food insecurity among college students is substantial. According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, about 3.8 million undergraduate students — roughly 23% of that population — experienced food insecurity that year. Other research from KCUR that same year showed rates around 29% among four-year college students and up to 38% among two-year college students.
Food insecurity isn’t just missing the occasional meal. The GAO found that among those students, 2.2 million had “very low” food security, meaning they faced multiple instances of eating less or skipping meals because they couldn’t afford enough food. Many students are already trying to eat and learn on tight budgets, and any policy that makes food access more precarious deserves scrutiny, especially when those same policies contribute to waste.
Every Friday, dining halls and markets churn out extra food as students rush to use their final swipes. Uneaten leftovers, uneaten portions and unused swipes all become invisible waste; money spent but never meaningfully used. At a university that prides itself on sustainability, that’s a glaring contradiction. We preach zero waste, but our dining model encourages overconsumption or loss just to beat a timer.
“If CSU truly believes that “Rams take care of Rams,” then it’s time to reexamine whether its own dining policies live up to that principle.”
Other campuses have already recognized that rigid meal swipe systems create this exact problem. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, for example, students successfully advocated for a policy change that will allow certain meal plans to carry over up to three unused weekly meals starting October 2025, according to The Daily Nexus. In Philadelphia, two schools operate programs called HawkHUB and Feed a Dragon, which let students donate unused swipes through simple online portals, The Temple News reported. These examples prove reform is not only possible but practical.
At CSU, the current “use it or lose it” setup creates unnecessary stress and forces students to make needless choices. A heavy week of exams, work shifts, travel or illness can easily mean missed meals. Then Friday hits, and students find themselves trying to use up swipes they already paid for instead of saving them for when they actually need them. For students juggling part-time jobs or health challenges, the policy feels like punishment for having a busy or unpredictable life.
CSU’s own Rams Against Hunger program has done vital, life-changing work in this space. Through its food pantry, meal swipe donations and partnerships with Swipe Out Hunger, it provides tangible relief for students facing food insecurity. It’s a model of compassion and resourcefulness, but it’s also forced to work within the limitations of a system that could be doing more upstream. If unused swipes were automatically redirected into that program or allowed to roll over, Rams Against Hunger could amplify its reach without adding cost. The infrastructure already exists.
That’s what makes this so frustrating: CSU clearly has the capacity to innovate. We have a campus full of Grubhub delivery robots, a convenience fleet that navigates sidewalks delivering snacks. Yet, we can’t manage to carry over a few unused meal swipes. For a university that talks so much about sustainability, equity and student well-being, that disconnect is hard to ignore.
Right now, CSU’s meal swipe system doesn’t just waste food and money — it wastes opportunity. It punishes students for ordinary life circumstances: commuting, working, getting sick or having an unpredictable week. It contradicts the university’s stated goals around sustainability and student success, and it makes Rams Against Hunger fight a harder battle than it needs to.
If CSU truly believes that “Rams take care of Rams,” then it’s time to reexamine whether its own dining policies live up to that principle. Rolling over swipes or donating unused ones shouldn’t be a radical idea; it should be standard practice at a university that claims to care about students’ basic needs and sustainability.
Because every Friday, as students line up to spend the last of their meal swipes before the clock resets, we’re reminded that CSU knows how to feed people. It just hasn’t figured out how to feed everyone fairly.
Reach Maci Lesh at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
