OPTIMAL UNDERBOOKING? The residence hall food service at Northern Illinois University allocates each student a weekly allowance of "Dining Dollars." These are not transferable, and the buying power expires at the end of the week. University Housing is using those unspent dollars (which we can think of as unexercised options) as a reserve fund.

The reported amount of meal plan money left unspent by students last year was $2 million. The amount of money left unspent from August through mid-October last year has not significantly increased or decreased when compared to the amount left unspent during the same time frame this year, [Housing's Brien] Martin said.

The plan does not satisfy all dorm residents.

Students living in the residence halls, like sophomore history major Jeremy Bauer, think the neglect of a rollover meal plan is unfair to students.

"I'm spending $55 a week, and what if, for a few days during that week, they're serving food I don't like?" Bauer said.

Sophomore English major Becky Wait sees the value of a roll-over meal plan.

"I understand why they do it," Wait said regarding not rolling over meal plans. "But it would be nice if they rolled it over because some weeks when I go home I have about $20 left over and I wish I could get that back."

Housing's reasons for staying with the plan are less than convincing.

Although some students have expressed a desire to have a meal plan where the unspent money is rolled over from week to week, a rollover meal plan would cause difficulties in budgeting.

"It is a simple fact that our residents, for whatever reason, leave approximately $2 million in meal plan dollars unspent during the year," Martin said. "We still have to assume, during our budgeting process, that every student will use every dollar they have on their meal plans. It would be irresponsible otherwise."

Really? Is it irresponsible for the airlines to assume that not every passenger who has a reservation will check in? Here, we have a unit of the university that is requiring residents to buy rights to more food than experience has revealed they will eat. What's responsible about that?

The problem, Martin said, with having a rollover meal plan is that students will continue to skip meals as they do now.

"This would allow their meal plan rollovers to build up," he said. "How many students can eat four or five hundred dollars worth of food in a week or less?"

Students would then have a large amount of leftover money at the end of the semester, and not have a way to spend it.

"That, to me, would be a larger problem than a student who 'loses' ten dollars a week under the current system," Martin said.

Isn't the larger problem a lack of imagination? Years ago, the University of Wisconsin operated under a meal ticket system in which residents paid for the food they ate. A meal ticket was a card that represented $10 of food, and the cash registers of that era put a notch in the ticket alongside a printed entry showing the unspent claims. (This has to be easier to implement using magnetic cards.) Residents could buy three different meal plans, with varying numbers of meal tickets. The tickets were tradeable. Heavy eaters would subscribe to the plans with larger numbers of tickets. People who underestimated their hunger generally had the opportunity to buy tickets from people who overestimated. There was a last-period problem, in that all tickets would lose their value at the end of an academic year. Some $10 meal tickets may have been discounted to $9.50 or $9 in late May, but I don't recall any widespread dumping going on so as to leave campus with unexercised and out-of-the-money options. At the same time, Housing was able to budget for how much food to buy, because the total value of meal tickets contracted for with Housing was invariant to who owned them.