What are some of the financial implications if a campus dining ...

[SGallaher96]

What are some of the financial implications if a campus dining program allows students to use a dining hall meal equivalency credit at a retail operation on the campus? What kinds of limits would you place on this option in terms of where and
 
  when equivalency options could be used and how many of them could be used in lieu of meals in a traditional dining hall?

Question 2

Colleges and universities have their own human resource, marketing and other departments. Yet many campus dining departments find it necessary to create positions within their organizations for these same functions.
 
  Do you think this is necessary, or could they just as easily use the college's main departments for functions like accounting, marketing and human resources? What differences do you think exist between the type of workers a dining department would want to hire to operate a kitchen and the kinds a university would want to hire to provide education services?

[ky860224]

Answer to Question 1

Ask students to give their reaction to a policy in which a dinner meal equivalency credit for 7.85 would be provided instead of one visit to an all-you-care-to-eat dining hall.. Do students think that would be a fair value? Discuss why and why not (see following notes). Why would you want to offer that option? Why would you want to limit that option?

Bring up the fixed overhead cost of the dining halls, which must be borne by the resident students who use them. Most students assume the meal plan pays for only food and labor costs, and do not see fixed costs as coming out of their meal plan payments. That is one reason meal plan equivalency credits are usually lower than students expect them to be.

Ask students to consider the alternative: a campus with only retail, a la carte meal plans and pricing and which offers no all-you-care-to-eat facilities. Discuss how that approach might make it harder for students to manage a given amount of money allocated for meals throughout the semester.

Which approach do they think would offer the greatest value to the full range of residential students at the campus? To parents looking to know in advance how much a student's meal plan will cost over the course of a semester?

In the case of an all-retail meal plan, ask students to discuss the case of a resident who might spend his entire semester's retail credit even as six weeks still remained in a semester. (You might explore the temptation of campus c-stores, snacks and other item that retail debit plans can be used to purchase).Traditional meal plans guarantee that a student won't run out of meal plan credit in this way, but retail plans can't. Discuss the pros and cons from both a student's and a parent's point of view.

Answer to Question 2

Some might argue that setting up separate specialists for functions like this is just redundant empire building and that such positions could be eliminated to reduce dining department costs, But most campus dining directors would point out that providing foodservice (and hiring the right kinds of people to do this well) is a specialty area in which the larger institution has little or no expertise. This gets to the heart of the idea that campus dining and other forms of onsite foodservice are not part of the core business of the larger organization, and need to operate as separate businesses in their own right.

Further, many functions in foodservice are quite specialized. Marketing, IT and other managers need to be intimately versed in the way operations are conducted within the department in order to successfully apply their formal skills to the challenges the department faces. For example, accounting must be able to track cash purchases, meal plan purchases, meal plan equivalency credit purchases and so on in ways that allow the department to analyze and manage overall dining revenues and costs successfully. They often have to develop specialized techniques for tracking and reporting these kinds of transactions and how they interact with each other.

Most positions elsewhere on a college campus are academic or administrative and require formal levels of education. Many foodservice jobs have requirements that are based primarily on previous foodservice experience. Supervisors and managers often need the kind of people skills and experience that will allow them to oversee the hands-on tasks these front line workers perform.

Ask students to imagine themselves in the employee evaluation process for typical foodservice jobs like cook, line server, dishwasher, etc.. What kinds of questions would be appropriate to ask prospective employees for such jobs, and discuss how the interview candidates' responses could be evaluated and their experience validated.

Have students look at the organizational charts shown in Figures 2 and 3 . Then, to illustrate some of these issues further, continue the exercise by asking them to consider a different type of campus dining employee, a marketing manager. He or she will be heavily involved in developing and promoting special events on campus, producing signage and promotional materials that add value or excitement to menu offerings and which improve operating metrics like participation in meals plans by off campus students.

Use the same exercise to explore the kind of experience and skills a foodservice director look for in a prospective IT specialist who will be involved in coordinating a foodservice department's IT operations with those of the main campus.

[SGallaher96]

Thank you!

[ky860224]

Always glad to help...