We came up with several alternative solutions. The first solution seems like the most obvious: remove the cap on dining dollars at the Union. This would allow those with no other dining options to eat meals at the Union as many times as they need.
But this solution raises a new possibility: what if you run out of dining dollars? As of now, Purdue's policy is once you've spend your dining dollars, they're only renewed at the start of the next semester. We figured that you should be allowed to add to your dining dollars, much like you would do with your Boiler Express card. This would eliminate the possibility of not being able to purchase food at the Union.
However, Director of Dining Jill Irvin addresses this in an email: "When a student uses their dining dollars at the Union, we actually have to pay them this money. Of course, this means that this decreases the money that we have available to provide our services. An amount of $25 is a way of providing students a little more flexibility without us having to severely decrease services to provide."
When asked what would be the outcome of removing the dining dollar cap, Ms. Irving responded, "We would have to either decrease those services (close some operations) or increase our rates. I don't think that either of these two changes would be met favorably by our customers."
So while raising the dining dollar cap seems like the easiest solution at first, it would actually increase the rates of food at the Union. This solution would actually cause more problems than it would solve. Furthermore, if the cap won't be raised, then there's no need to add additional funds to the dining dollars
Which brings up another question: why not just use you Boilerexpress card to pay for your meals? There's no cap on how much you can spend using Boiler Express, and you can add more if you run out.
While the Boilerexpress option may be the best of the alternative solutions, it doesn't address the problem of using meals that you've already paid for. On-campus students have meal plans that are already paid for, so it makes sense to utilize those meals instead of spending money for a meal using Boilerexpress.
