There are many constants in a college student’s life, including partying hard, studying harder and occasionally cursing their pockets for lack of funds. Especially when it comes to food.
Let’s face it: College kids are so broke it isn’t even funny.
That doesn’t mean we don’t laugh about it, but we shouldn’t be taken advantage of financially by the University. And yet, that’s exactly what’s been happening.
Aside from the high costs of textbooks and the ridiculousness that is TigerCash, the University decided to let us starve, at least on the weekends. A glance at the LSU Dining Hall’s website reveals Tiger Lair’s fall hours have been cut and constructed to fit nobody’s schedule. It’s my deepest apologies to say if you have any dietary needs, they won’t be met.
They’ve gone from allowing us to eat steamed vegetables at the Panda Express whenever we want on a Saturday afternoon to making it as strict as a chemistry lab report. There are four meal times now, and you can only get one transfer per meal time.
What exactly does our university think of us? Are we their pets or something? Do we really need the food put out for us at certain times then taken away so we don’t get grossly obese?
Pre-veterinary medicine sophomore Katherine Sternitzke adamantly disagreed with these new procedures.
“It’s funny how the University thinks we’re responsible enough to take the right classes and come up with the money for our meal plan, but they don’t seem to think we’re capable of being able to eat on our own time schedule,” Sternitzke said.
But the fact of the matter is that by being shoved in the direction of this new schedule, chances are we will be paying approximately an additional $20 on average for all those meals we can’t eat on campus. And with a little more than 16 weekends in a semester that comes out to a staggering $320 that should be spent elsewhere.
I understand it’s not just that LSU enjoys punishing those first and second-year students by forcing them to get meal plans, it’s that the University needs to save money.
Chancellor Michael Martin has spoken about the challenge of cutting the University’s budget while also maintaining the University’s excellence using every effort to both cut funds and fix our struggling infrastructure.
It seems like a challenge — one that isn’t really being worked on the way they say it is.
If there’s anything that needs to be fixed in this University, it’s the way our infrastructure is being fixed and the way it’s disrespecting us as a student body.
 
Priyanka Bhatia is a 19-year-old pre-veterinary sophomore from San Jose, Calif. Follow her on Twitter @TDR_PBhatia.
 
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Contact Priyanka Bhatia at [email protected]