Editor's Note: This is the third in a three-part series looking at the future of campus dining options.
On a campus of just over 4,000 undergraduates, Dartmouth Dining Services runs more dining halls and offers more meal plans than do operations at much larger schools. As DDS tries to maintain a variety of dining options for students while balancing its books, it is also committed to paying its employees a living wage.
In an interview with The Dartmouth, Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman said that offering this level of variety is causing DDS to overextend itself.
"We truly are overbuilt in terms of dining venues for the size student population we have," Redman said. "It's hugely inefficient and costly ... [but] as long as you don't mind paying for it, we're happy to charge you."
Redman said that a food service consulting group the College brought in 2004 to assess DDS's operations, Ricca Associates, reported that it was "amazed we're still open." After conducting a nine-month review, the firm told administrators that DDS was running "way too many venues," offering too many meal plans and lacked a strategy to sustain itself long-term.
DDS Director Tucker Rossiter said that although students like the flexibility of the current Declining Balance Accounts, "there's no missed meal factor that other schools use to balance their budget, pay the bills."
Because students purchase DBA now rather than buy a set number of meals per term, they tend to pay less up front than they end up spending by the end of the term. DDS has to count on students "going negative" to make ends meet.
Redman said he would be interested in installing an all-you-can-eat dining option on campus, if only for dinner hours at one of the venues. Not only would such a move cater to "large eaters," it could help make DDS more profitable.
At this time, an all-you-can-eat meal is the only option dining services can't offer students, he said, because there are no dining halls with enough seats in one place.
The largest dining facility, Thayer Dining Hall, can seat only 700 students but sees an influx of over 1,500 students at peak dinner hour.
Redman said he wants to leave the option open for future administrators to take up -- something he'll keep in mind as long-term construction projects, including the reconstruction of Thayer Dining Hall, are being planned.
He also said that offering DBA plans generates an equity issue because students who get financial aid for dining receive a flat $1,200 per term, which does not necessarily provide for the same number of meals from student to student.
"I'm beginning to feel from what I'm hearing ... that students are beginning to question the value for their money for this program," Redman said.
While DDS's top priority is to meet the wants and needs of students, administrators said, the service also adheres strongly to a philosophy of paying its workers a living wage.
DDS, a $14.7-million self-run operation under the College, employs about 100 students, but most of its labor costs are associated with its 130 full-time, hourly-paid employees. The service relies heavily on full-time workers from outside the student body in part because of the D-Plan, which shuffles students on and off campus each term.
Labor costs account for about 46 cents of every dollar spent at the service's 12 dining operations, according to Rossiter. DDS offers some of the most stable and best-compensated food service jobs in the Upper Valley area, he said.
"The fact that we do pay a good wage, we do pay good benefits, makes DDS [and] just the College in general desirable employers," Rossiter said.
Redman said that considering the high cost of living in the Hanover area, even a single person without family commitments could not be expected to live and thrive on the wages he or she would receive working similar food service jobs in the community.
"We're not hiring a migrant labor force," he said. "We're hiring people who live and work in this community and we want them to feel good about their relationship with Dartmouth."
Full-time employees earn about $15 or $16 per hour on the lower end of the pay scale, with the more specialized workers such as butchers earning up to $30 per hour, according to Redman.
Benefit costs, primarily for health care, make up 37 percent of every dollar DDS employees earn, Rossiter said.
"The living wage is the only acceptable wage we pay at Dartmouth College," Rossiter said, pointing out that the living wage philosophy extends across all departments and operations at the institution.
Although all DDS's full-time workers besides Collis Caf employees are unionized, Rossiter said that unionization has had relatively little effect on the compensation they receive. The DDS workers' union, which is the same union Facilities, Operations and Maintenance, Office of Residential Life and Safety and Security workers belong to, has been negotiating contracts for about 40 years.
"[DDS workers] serve a valuable purpose. I truly believe Dartmouth would be paying what we pay now with or without a union," Redman said.
