Month: September 2026

David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.

On August 19,  a respected foodservice market research firm published a piece titled “College Dining Is No Longer Built Around the Dining Hall.” The argument is tidy. Students no longer follow a predictable day. The campus is “a collection of occasions.” The dining hall still matters, but only as one node in an ecosystem of c-stores, kiosks, pizza and hot food vending machines, food lockers, and grab-and-go. The closing line, which I expect to hear on the C3X exhibit floor in Chicago next week: “The next college dining model will not be defined by one concept or technology. It will be built around flexibility.”

So yes, the industry just declared the dining hall optional. To be fair, the author is describing what is happening. Syracuse launched campus-wide mobile ordering on August 3. Nearly every renewal I see this fall has a retail conversion in the deck. The trade has reached consensus.

The consensus is confidently wrong. Confident, because it is backed by sales data and vendor decks. Wrong, because it measures everything except the one outcome campuses are actually paying for: students who stay.

Did Anyone Ask the Freshman Eating Alone in Her Room?

Notice who is missing from the flexibility thesis. It surveys operators, technology vendors, and consumer trend data. It never surveys the freshman who moved in three weeks ago, has not yet found her people, and has just learned that the easiest way to eat on this campus is to never walk into a room full of strangers.

Across thirty-six years of asking newly minted freshmen what they were looking forward to when they were high school seniors, the answer comes back in two words, almost universally: freedom and social. Not one of them has ever said convenience. The industry built a model around what is easy to sell and easy to scale, then called it what students want. Nobody asked her. She is sitting alone with a delivery bag, living inside the answer.

A Collection of Occasions Is a Collection of Tables of One

Read the thesis the way she experiences it. Breakfast is a mobile order from a locker. Lunch is a grab-and-go salad on a bench, phone in hand. Dinner is delivery to the residence hall because the app made it easy, and the dining commons is closed or has very limited options available. Every occasion was convenient. Every one was eaten alone.

Add them up across a semester and you have not built an ecosystem. You have built a schedule of solitude and loneliness. She is not lonely because your food is bad. She is lonely because your program has been engineered so she never has to sit down with anyone. Flexibility is the polite name for routing students away from the one room where the Big Mix happens, one occasion at a time.

Your Dining Hall Has the Potential to Be the Single Most Potent Day-to-Day Catalyst Fostering Human Connection and Increasing Student Retention

Potential is the operative word. A dining hall run like a cafeteria is Grandma’s rotary telephone: it still works, and nobody under twenty wants to use it. Crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking, the same dining hall becomes the iPhone 18 Pro Max: the device every student reaches for first, all day, without being told to. It becomes the Social Coliseum, the only venue on campus that touches every student every day, two and three times a day, where a freshman from a town of eight hundred sits next to a kid from a city of eight million until strangers become the friends who decide whether she returns as a sophomore. Food is the excuse. Belonging is the outcome.

That is why it is a retention instrument, not a food service line. Colleges know the First 45 Days in their bones: connect socially by roughly Halloween and the odds of returning rise sharply. No other building on campus can deliver that many unscripted human collisions, that often, to that many students. A locker cannot. A kiosk cannot. A vending machine never will. Every meal routed away from the commons during those forty-five days is a withdrawal from the mixing chamber at the exact moment attendance there matters most.

SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking: The Proof

I am not offering an opinion against a trend. I am offering a method with a track record.

SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ starts from the opposite premise: the dining commons is the campus living room, and it must be designed, staffed, and priced so students choose it. Abundance Thinking is the operating discipline behind it. Hours built around the Student Clock instead of the labor schedule. Predictable Abundance, so the good stuff is still there at 8:45. Table configurations that invite joining, so a student eating alone is still inside the hum of the crowd. A meal plan whose message is “come as often as you want.”

The proof is not theoretical. At Montana State University, after the campus-wide dining master plan and the Miller Dining Hall renovation, daily meal transactions grew from roughly 5,500 to 9,600, a figure on the public record, and the campus went on to build the Rendezvous Dining Pavilion to meet the demand. Students showed up because the room earned the right to be chosen. Across nearly 500 campuses, programs rebuilt this way have historically lifted retention by one to three points, often while the incumbent operator kept running the kitchen. Nobody handed those students a mandate. They handed them a reason.

The clearest evidence is on film. SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award winner Nick Nanton, was shot on four campuses across two countries. The voices are first-year students describing what it feels like when a campus engineers belonging instead of leaving it to chance. Watch the mini documentary. None of them describe a locker.

Strengthen Your Core Business First, Then Build Your Retail Portfolio

I am not against mobile ordering, c-stores, or a strong retail portfolio. Serve the athlete at 6 a.m., the commuter between classes, the junior with a car. A well-built retail portfolio is good hospitality and good business. The mistake is sequence. Residential dining is your core business. Retail is the portfolio you build around it, not the substitute you build instead of it.

Here is the gate. If your commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges propping up the count in retail on or off campus, your core is strong and the retail you add will be pure upside. Below that number, every new “occasion” is not expanding choice. It is subsidizing the exit from a core that has not yet earned its customers. The room never lies. Walk it at 6:30 on a Tuesday before you approve the next locker.

The industry has declared the dining hall optional. Your freshman eating alone in her room has been living with that decision since move-in. Before the next retail conversion goes into your renewal, ask her whether flexibility is what she signed up for.

This is not only solvable, it is preventable. But it will not be solved by the people selling the occasions. Build the Social Coliseum first. Then, and only then, build the occasions around it.

David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.

There is a comforting ritual in higher education dining. Before a contract renewal, before a rate increase, before a board presentation, someone pulls the benchmarks. How does our cost per meal compare to schools our size? What commission rate are similar institutions getting? Are our meal plan prices in line with the peer set? The numbers come back. Everyone exhales. The program is declared healthy because it sits comfortably in the middle of the pack.

It feels rigorous. It produces a tidy chart for the board deck.

But peer benchmarking quietly smuggles in an assumption that deserves far more scrutiny than it gets: that the median of your peer set is a target worth hitting.

What if it isn’t?

What if your peers are getting it wrong too, and all your careful benchmarking has done is help you arrive at the middle of a flawed distribution?

Benchmarks Answer the Wrong First Question

Benchmarking answers one question very well: Are we normal?

That is useful. The trouble is that normal and good are not the same thing, and in campus dining they often diverge sharply.

The same handful of national operators serve the overwhelming majority of campuses. They bring the same templates, commissions, capital offers, and renewal playbook to every institution they court. When a school benchmarks its commission rate against twenty peers, it is largely measuring itself against terms those same operators wrote.

The “industry standard” is not an independent measure of fair value. It is one industry’s standardized playbook across hundreds of campuses.

If most schools negotiated the same mediocre terms and ran the same RFP-then-resign-the-incumbent process, matching them does not mean you are doing well.

It means you are averagely wrong.

You have benchmarked your way to the center of a distribution that nobody ever stopped to question.

Benchmarking Punishes the Schools Doing It Right

Benchmarking rewards conformity and quietly penalizes the outliers, including the good ones.

Imagine a school that brought dining in house and runs a lean, transparent self-operated program. Or one that negotiated an open-book management agreement with real audit rights. In a benchmarking exercise, those schools look like anomalies. Their numbers get flagged, explained away, and excluded as not really comparable.

The institutions that figured out a better way become statistical noise rather than examples to study.

That is the quiet tragedy. The median becomes the destination. Deviation becomes risk, even when it points toward better. A program that aspires only to be normal has capped its ambition at average.

The Question the Chart Never Asks

The chart tells you where you sit relative to other schools. It does not tell you whether you are delivering fair value to students or a responsible return on institutional dollars.

A board’s fiduciary duty is not to be normal. It is to steward resources well and serve students. “We are right in line with our peers” can be true and completely beside the point. If the peer set is overpaying, under-governing, and underserving students, being in line is not reassurance.

It is shared exposure.

Make it concrete. Suppose every institution in your comparison group subsidizes catering or retail out of other funds, and you do too. Does everyone doing it mean you should keep doing it? Or suppose every peer posts meal plan participation of 50 percent or less, and so do you.

Call that what it is. Fifty percent participation is a C-minus or D-plus, even if it matches the chart. Sitting in the middle of a pack earning a near-failing grade does not make your program healthy.

It makes the F look like consensus.

After thirty-six years of interviewing senior administrators on college and university campuses, this consultant has watched that consensus launder mediocre or failing outcomes into targets. There are proven strategies to drive meal plan participation to 70 percent or higher, and in most cases to bring retail to breakeven or profit without subsidies or meal plan exchange dollars. Peers accepting subsidized retail and tepid participation as normal does not make those outcomes inevitable.

It makes them a shared bad habit. Benchmarking against that habit launders it into a goal.

First Principles, Then the Smoke Detector

Do not throw the spreadsheets away. Change the order of operations.

Start from first principles. What does your student population actually need and want? What is your real cost structure once you account for food, labor, utilities, space, capital, and fees that may never appear on a single invoice? What should a strong dining program cost, and what should it deliver? Model that from the ground up, grounded in your own institution rather than in someone else’s contract.

Then bring in the peer data. Not as the target. As a sanity check at the edges. If your first-principles model and your actuals diverge wildly either way, investigate.

Benchmarks are excellent smoke detectors. They are terrible architects.

Use them to spot anomalies worth a hard look, not to set the standard. That is the SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ move: design the mixing chamber and the Student Clock first, then let the peer chart sit in the appendix. Voluntary participation, the purest measure of value, will tell you whether you built a Social Coliseum or merely matched a pack that never asked for one.

Pull Your Number Before the Next Deck

Peer comparison is not worthless. A board chart against twenty similar institutions is a legitimate tool. Diverging dramatically from peers without a clear reason is its own risk.

So do not stop looking at your peers. Stop letting them set the ceiling. A benchmark is a reference point, not a finish line. Treat the median as your goal, and you will never beat it.

So here is the assignment. Before your next renewal, before the next chart goes in the board deck, pull your no-leakage residential participation. Grade it on the scale this firm uses across nearly 500 campuses: 38 percent is an F, 70 percent is B-plus or A-minus, 80 percent is A-plus. Then ask whether your peer chart would have celebrated that F because everyone else posted one too.

Are we normal? Or are we good?

The schools that win at dining are not the ones who benchmarked their way to average. They are the ones who asked the uncomfortable question first, sat with the answer, and built from there through Abundance Thinking instead of through the median.

What if your peers are getting it wrong too?

The answer may be the most valuable thing your benchmarking exercise never told you.

David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.

General move-in at Wolverine Village began this past week on the University of Michigan campus, and the Michigan Daily walked the story the way a campus paper should: through the doors, into the courtyard, into the dining hall. A $649 million residence hall on the former Elbel Field site on Hill Street. Five buildings around a courtyard. About 2,300 new beds. A dining hall with more than 800 seats. First on campus to use all-electric culinary appliances. Second floor with private event rooms and a teaching kitchen, in a partnership between LSA and Michigan Dining around food, culture, and sustainability.

Michigan made a bet worth noticing.

Not beds alone. Beds and a Social Coliseum-scale dining hall in the same complex.

Read that again.

The Courtyard Is Not Decoration

LSA freshman Anish Kulkarni told the Daily the dining hall is awesome, the best one on campus, better than South Quad. Jose Pizarro, father of an LSA freshman visiting from Puerto Rico, said he likes the central open space because it creates that sense of community, and the dining hall is right there. Engineering freshman Caroline Ward wanted first-choice housing close to Central Campus, with air conditioning in the new dorms. Geo-exchange and solar are part of the package. Building 4’s delay scare resolved, and residents moved in on schedule.

Praise where it is due. A university put community architecture into the brief, not as a brochure line after the ribbon cutting, but as courtyard, seats, and a kitchen students can see. I am not claiming PKC designed Wolverine Village. Michigan is not on our public projects story list. I am saying the move-in scene asks every campus with a housing pro forma open on the desk a sharper question than square footage ever will.

You modeled the beds. Did anyone model the reason to stay in them?

Housing Without a Mixing Chamber

I have watched this movie across nearly 500 higher education campuses. Housing boards authorize beds because beds are countable. Occupancy is a line item. Net present value is a slide. Then the first-year class moves in, and the real product reveals itself at 7:30 p.m. in the dining room: tables of one, or the lean of laughter across a full Social Coliseum.

Housing without a mixing chamber is a hollow residential promise.

A beautiful door on an empty room is still an empty room. A 2,300-bed complex with a gorgeous dining hall that students treat as optional is still a residential product that failed the Student Clock. The beds get you enrollment night. The kitchen of the campus is what keeps the First 45 Days from turning into DoorDash and loneliness.

Food is the excuse. Belonging is the outcome.

Michigan put more than 800 seats next to 2,300 beds. That ratio is a design statement. Seats are not wallpaper. Seats are capacity for accidental collisions, for the Big Mix, for freshmen to find their people before the patterns harden. When the dining hall is the living room of the residential community, Gravitational Pull does the enrollment work that marketing cannot buy later.

The Room Never Lies

SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ starts from a blunt premise: the dining commons is the kitchen of the campus the way the kitchen is the heart of a home. Students do not build a Student Social Biome in a corridor. They build it where the food is good enough, abundant enough, and open enough on their clock that lingering feels natural. Predictable Abundance beats rationing. Anytime Dining beats the Operator Clock. Voluntary participation, the purest measure of value, tells you whether the room earned the walk.

Hold those numbers in your head: 2,300 beds, more than 800 seats, one courtyard that parents already read as community.

Now ask the question the capital model rarely asks. If those seats sit half empty by October, what did the beds actually buy? If the teaching kitchen hosts a beautiful program while the main floor loses the lean, which room is telling the truth? The room never lies. Occupancy can. A full residence hall with an empty mixing chamber is still a belonging failure wearing a successful housing ribbon.

I have seen campuses celebrate capital while the no-leakage participation number quietly posts an F. Thirty-eight percent is an F. Seventy percent is B-plus, A-minus. Eighty percent is A-plus. Retail exchanges do not rescue the grade. They curve it. The test is whether students choose the hall because it is the gravitational center of their day, not because a mandate dragged them through the door.

Model Belonging Like You Modeled Beds

Campuses know how to model beds. Soft costs. Hard costs. Phasing. Geo-exchange. All-electric kitchens. Teaching spaces. Partner colleges. That rigor is real, and Michigan’s move-in coverage shows what it looks like when the dining hall is in the brief from day one instead of bolted on as an afterthought.

The missing sheet in too many housing packages is the belonging model. Who eats where in the First 45 Days? What is the seat-to-bed ratio in the newest residential product? What hours match the Student Clock after practice and lab? How do you keep the Inferior Program Penalty from turning a new building into a place students sleep while they find community somewhere else?

One clause for the industry: when universities bet hundreds of millions on housing, including projects like WKU’s large P3, the dining hall is not amenity language. It is the reason the beds stay warm with friendship instead of just with HVAC.

Walk Your Newest Housing This Week

So here is the assignment. This week, walk Wolverine Village’s idea onto your own campus. Go to your newest residence hall. Count the beds the board approved. Count the seats in the dining room attached to it, or notice the absence if there is no mixing chamber in walking distance. Then show up at 7:30. Count tables of one. Count the lean. Watch whether freshmen are finding their people or eating with a phone for company.

You modeled the beds. The room will tell you whether anyone modeled the reason to stay in them.

Food is the excuse. Belonging is the outcome. Build the Social Coliseum where the beds already are, or watch a beautiful residential promise empty out one quiet table at a time.