Here at Trinity, the administration takes pride in offering an education that promotes critical thinking and independent decision-making. Yay! Unless, of course, that choice involves where to eat and how much to reasonably pay. Suddenly, you and your wallet don’t get a choice.
Trinity’s three-year residency requirement already restricts where students live, forcing mandatory residency in dorms, which are nowhere near as nice as nearby apartments of the same price. Along with this, Trinity’s new and “improved” meal plan for the 2026-2027 school year forces students to pay more for less. Trinity shouldn’t have a mandatory meal plan, and any admin’s claim of necessity is simply an excuse.
At the April 15 SGA meeting, Mark Detterick, vice president for finance and administration, openly acknowledged that they are intentionally trying to push students towards Mabee Dining Hall because operating two dining halls for a campus of about 2,400 students is “costly.” And that if the meal plan isn’t enforced, students won’t eat.
However, the argument that if the meal plan isn’t enforced, students won’t eat makes no sense. Sure, a university with a three-year residency requirement certainly has an obligation to feed its students, but there is no need to force a meal plan down our throats when there are more cost effective and healthier choices available. If students cannot find other options to eat, then they can buy the meal plan. It shouldn’t be forced upon us.
Realistically speaking, students will never be able to finish meal swipes in a semester, and instead, the school pockets the extra profit generated from the plan. Or what if… You just built more kitchens for students? At roughly $6,000 (the sum of Bronze Plan annually), a school year’s worth of groceries would be more than enough for us to cook high-quality meals, learn how to meal-plan and, most importantly, take back our financial independence.
Even though the administration recently changed the meal plan (again), mathematically, students still lose out. While they do listen to student feedback, the changes aren’t enough and end up costing more money while providing less and less each year. During the 2025-2026 school year, the Bronze Plan provided $59.43 (seven times $8.49) worth of weekly meal swipes, along with $300 Bonus Bucks, charging $2,706 a semester. However, next year, students on the same plan will only get $44.95 (five times $8.99) worth of weekly meal swipes, along with a measly $100 Bonus Bucks a semester for an increase in total cost to $2,922.75.
For some reason, our SGA senators decided to settle with this instead of pushing back. The admin did say that if SGA didn’t approve of this revised plan, the previous changes would go into effect instead, but the new proposal isn’t much better. This is just SGA’s vote to switch garbage for trash.
At this point, the issue isn’t just the inconvenience of walking down to Mabee for individuals who can’t move up and down campus easily or someone who is cramming for an exam, it’s Trinity’s prioritizing cost-efficiency on things as basic as good quality food. Instead, administration prioritizes profit over student preferences, and the meal plan is stripped from a service into a lucrative business model. Even worse is that students have no choice but to accept and pay for these changes due to the required meal plan. To me, this is blatantly disgusting. Trinity shouldn’t control food as a mandatory payment or require us to use their dining hall.
Students with legitimate medical needs, disabilities or diet restrictions that cannot be covered by the dining hall should know that they can apply for meal plan exemption. These needs are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and students with disabilities can ask the school to work with them on that.
If the university decides to continue to frustrate students by making the meal plan work worse than before, students can push back. Tell all of your high school contacts not to apply to Trinity. Every dollar saved from a meal plan exemption or reduction is a dollar not unwillingly given to a money-hungry administration.
There are many ways to help students feed themselves. But the Trinity admin instead chooses the option to pocket as much money as possible. The most decent thing they should do is at least come out and tell us, “It’s not for your benefit, it’s for us.” Hiding behind the facade of students needing to buy an expensive meal plan that they’ll never finish and forcing them to eat at Mabee (because there are just no grocery stores, restaurants, or anything in San Antonio) shows the poor intentions of our university, and frankly, we as students should acknowledge and fight this.
