The Mandatory Purchase of Meal Tickets
Why must students living in dormitory buy meal tickets?
Cub-reporter Seo Yea-weon
seoyeaweon@naver.com
The mandatory purchase of meal tickets to enter the dormitory has been one of the most consistent controversies at Busan University of Foreign Studies since 2018. The reason for the constant controversy over mandatory meals is the burden of students to pay hundreds of thousands of won for dormitory meals at a time and the perception that the university requires students to buy food tickets in the midst of fierce competition to move into the dormitory. In addition, students have been constantly complaining of the school's regulations regarding refunds. Refunds are very difficult to receive, except in special situations such as quitting in the middle of the semester, employment or military enlistment, or health problems, and even if refunds are possible, only 90% of the total amount is returned. In addition, the designated mealtimes are short, with only one to two hours, so if the mealtime overlaps with the lecture time, students will not be able to eat, or if they get a part-time job, they will not be able to use the meal tickets and will be forced to throw away the tickets. As a result, students who give up eating at the dormitory effectively have to pay double for meals.
Outside the school, criticism has been raised that it is an inappropriate guideline in that it is a ‘meal ticket business' for students and seriously infringes on their options. Yang Mi-sook, secretary-general of the Busan People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, said, "In situations where eating habits and preferences are diversified, and where the compulsory purchasing of food tickets restricts options is inappropriate." In addition, because meal tickets cannot be refunded or carried forward it can be seen as the university authorities and dormitories passing on to students the financial viability problems which the school must endure. The secretary-general further criticized the system, saying, "Schools and dormitories should think about how to improve the operation of restaurants instead of burdening students, and in fact, it is not desirable to force them to buy meal tickets."
It is said that more than 100 schools nationwide, including BUFS, are running mandatory meal ticket purchasing programs. The universities that operate compulsory dormitory meal systems explain that the sale of compulsory meals is beneficial to students as a result because it enables an 'economy of scale' and lowers restaurant prices overall. The term 'economy of scale' refers to a case where the increase in output increases more significantly than the increase in production factors such as labor and capital when the production scale of a company increases. Universities that enforce compulsory dormitory meals do not stop here and explain that they do not have to throw away unnecessary food because they can predict the demand for students who use dormitory restaurants. As such, it was argued that it should be improved by showing a negative position on dormitory mandatory meals outside the school, but as a result, it turns out that there were no universities that improved or changed.