Month: October 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.

Trellis Strategies surveyed more than 65,000 students at two-year and four-year institutions for its most recent Student Financial Wellness Survey. Three numbers from it belong on the desk of everyone who designs a meal plan.

Sixty-five percent of students had run out of money at least once since the start of the year. Fifty-four percent said they would struggle to come up with $500 for an unexpected expense. More than half reported at least one form of basic needs insecurity. Twenty-eight percent had used buy-now-pay-later services, and 13 percent had borrowed through payday or auto title loans.

A Trellis researcher summed it up in one sentence: “a lot of students are living on the edge.”

Now hold those numbers next to the plan design the campus dining industry is adopting fastest. It is called dining dollars, or flex points, or a declining balance, and it works like a debit card: a sum loaded in August, spent at retail prices, gone when it is gone. This fall, campuses from coast to coast have shifted weight from meal swipes toward dollars, in some cases cutting the number of locations where a swipe works at all. The stated reasons are sincere: flexibility, choice, unused swipes.

Here is the question nobody in the plan meeting is asking. For a student who has already run out of money once this year, what is a declining balance except a second account to overdraw?

The Mid-Semester Problem

Every dining director knows the shape of it. Dining dollars are spent fastest in the first six weeks, when everything is new and the balance looks large. By mid-semester the number on the screen has gotten small, and on many campuses a meaningful share of students spend the back half of the semester either rationing their own meals or spending money they do not have to make it to the end of the term. The plan did not run out of food. It ran out of currency.

Then look at what a student with no balance does. They skip lunch. They buy the cheapest calories in the market. They put dinner on a credit card they are struggling to pay off, or on the buy-now-pay-later app, the survey says more than a quarter of their classmates already use. Their family covers the gap if they can. If they cannot, they are hungry on a campus where he or she holds a paid meal plan.

I have described the cascade for years. A mediocre or failing program sends students off campus for food, the extra dollars are financed by family or by financial aid, frustration compounds, and by spring comes the financial recalibration, when the student and their parents conclude the housing and food money is better spent off campus. The declining balance accelerates every step, because it builds the running-out into the design.

Breakage Is Not a Feature

The industry has a word for the money students do not spend: breakage. On a declining-balance plan, unspent dollars at the end of the term are revenue. On a swipe plan, unused meals are revenue. Plans are often priced with that revenue in mind, which means the campus does better financially when students eat less than they paid for.

I wrote in The Porter Principles that this is the only business model in America that begs you to buy down. Most parents do not want to buy down. They want the biggest plan on the menu, as an expression of love, because it promises to take care of their son or daughter. A plan that quietly profits when the student eats less betrays that purchase, and the Trellis numbers tell you which students it betrays first: the 54 percent who cannot find $500, and the more than half who are already insecure in at least one basic need.

I am not an economist, and this is not a personal finance column. It is a design question, and design is what we do.

What Cannot Run Out

The alternative is not complicated. An all-access residential plan, honestly delivered, is the one item on a student’s bill that cannot be overdrawn. It does not care what day of the semester it is. It does not meter her. The student who ran out of money by mid-semester eats the same dinner in the last week of the semester as the student whose parents wire cash every week, at the same table, with no visible difference between them. That is not only good policy for food security. It is the SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ of the room: when nobody’s balance is showing, everybody belongs.

Honestly delivered is the condition. An all-access plan attached to a cafeteria operating system, with limited hours, gaps between meal periods, no late night, and stations that run out before the posted close, is a promise the room does not keep, and students will buy around it. Abundance Thinking is what makes the promise real: hours built around the Student Clock, Predictable Abundance so the good stuff is still there at 8:45 pm, and table configurations that invite joining.

Voluntary participation is the purest measure of value. If your residential commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges in retail propping up the count, you have a Social Coliseum. You also have a campus where the mid-semester problem does not exist.

Our mini documentary, SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, was filmed 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. Not one of them is checking a balance.

Three Questions for the Plan Meeting

The 2027-28 meal plans are being designed right now on most campuses. Before the structure is set, ask three things.

First, pull the dining dollar balances by week for last fall. On what date did the median first-year student’s balance fall below the cost of one more week of meals? That date is the day your plan started sending students to credit cards.

Second, ask what the plan is designed to do when a student runs out. If the honest answer is “nothing,” then the plan was designed for the 35 percent who never run out of money, and the survey says that is the minority.

Third, ask who benefits from breakage, and whether you would be comfortable explaining the answer to the parents who bought the biggest plan as an expression of love.

Two-thirds of students ran out of money this year. The campus cannot fix a student’s bank account. It can decide whether the meal plan is one more thing that runs out, or the one thing that does not. That is not only solvable; it is also preventable, and the design is already in your hands.

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 September 15th, DoorDash agreed to buy Grubhub’s campus dining business for $300 million. It is the platform, once called Tapingo, that students on more than 450 campuses use to order from their own campus dining locations and pay with their own dining dollars. The deal is expected to close in early 2027, and DoorDash has said it will keep expanding on campus.

Read that as what it is. A company that understands the student food dollar better than anyone has decided the campus is worth $300 million. DoorDash is coming for a larger share of your students’ meal plan money and their disposable income for food. Nobody at DoorDash has said so in these words, so let me be clear that this is my reading: it is a bet that when your students are hungry, your dining hall will be closed, restricted, or not worth the walk.

Here is the part nobody in the trade press wrote. You already have the business.

The Strongest Hand in Food Service

Think about what a residential dining program holds on the first day of the semester. The students live a few hundred feet from your kitchen. The meal plan is required, and it is already paid for. Most parents did not white-knuckle that purchase. They wanted the biggest plan on the menu, as an expression of love, because it promised to take care of their son or daughter. You have the customer, the money, the location, and the goodwill before you serve a single meal.

No restaurant in America starts with that hand. DoorDash certainly does not. To win one dinner from one of your students, it has to persuade her to pay a second time for a meal she has already bought from you, plus fees, plus a tip, and then wait for it.

A competitor in that position cannot beat you on strength. It can only capitalize on your weaknesses. And every weakness it has to work with is one we built ourselves.

Every Weakness Is an Opening

Two weeks after the deal was announced, a freshman explained to her student newspaper what she does when the dining hall closes for a mid-afternoon gap on weekends: “2-4 is exactly when lunch would be, so I end up DoorDashing.”

I am not singling out her campus. That sentence is spoken on every residential campus in America. And notice what it says. She did not choose delivery because it was better. She chose it because the door was locked.

Over the past thirty-six years on college and university campuses, I have watched programs create the same five weaknesses, and each one is an opening a delivery app is built to fill:

Fewer hours. Every hour cut from the schedule is an hour assigned to someone else.

Gaps between meal periods. The doors lock or the menu shrinks between breakfast and lunch and between lunch and dinner, and the student who got out of lab at 2:10 is on her own.

Limited or no late night. Hunger strikes at 10 p.m. That is the Student Clock, and it is the busiest hour on any delivery app.

Less on weekends. Shorter hours and thinner menus at the exact moments students have the most time to be together.

More restrictions. Rules about where, when, and how a student may use the plan she already paid for: swipe limits, timers, blackout periods, locations that do not count.

Each of those decisions looks like savings on a spreadsheet. Each one is a weakness, and a delivery platform does not need to be invited twice. That is not a criticism of DoorDash. It is doing what any good competitor does: finding the hours you are closed and the students you turned away, and showing up. And the cost does not stop at one dinner. The extra dollars are usually financed by family or by financial aid. Frustration compounds. By spring comes the financial recalibration, when the student and her parents conclude the housing and food money is better spent off campus altogether. That is no longer a lost meal. That is an empty bed.

The Kryptonite

I am not an antitrust lawyer or a technology analyst, and for all I know the new owner will prove to be a fine partner on the ordering side. My point is about what a delivery platform can and cannot do.

It can move food. It cannot make a friend.

When I ask newly minted freshmen what they were looking forward to about college back when they were high school seniors, the answer comes back in two words, almost universally: freedom and social. Nobody has ever told me “convenience.”

That is why SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking are the kryptonite.

Abundance Thinking closes every door we have been leaving open. Hours built around the Student Clock rather than the labor schedule. No gaps. Real late night. Weekends that are as good as Tuesdays. Stations that stay full until the posted close. A plan a student can use without reading the fine print.

SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ gives her the reason to come that no app can match. The dining commons becomes a Social Coliseum: to a campus what the kitchen is to your home. It evolves a dining transaction into a social transaction, with food playing a supporting role. The same faces, at the same tables, at the same hours, until the accidental third dinner with the same crew quietly becomes a friend group.

A burrito bowl at the residence hall door in eleven minutes is a good product. It loses every time to a room where her friends already are.

And there is a number that tells you whether you are winning. If your residential commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation, without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges in retail propping up the count, you have a Social Coliseum, and the business is yours to keep.

Our mini documentary, SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, was filmed 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. Not one of them is describing an order confirmation.

We Have Everything We Need to Win This

So here is the challenge before the deal closes. Take your posted hours for every residential location, seven days a week. Circle every gap, every early close, every weekend cutback, and every rule that tells a student no. Then write one word next to each circle: DoorDash. That is the list of weaknesses you are letting a competitor capitalize on, and every item on it was a decision someone on your campus made.

Which means every item on it can be unmade. So stop. Losing your students’ food dollars is not only solvable, it is also preventable. You hold the customer, the plan, the location, and the room. Organize them through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking, and DoorDash can come for your campus all it wants. There will be nothing left to exploit, and the $300 million bet will have been placed on the wrong campus. The most valuable app on her phone will be the one she forgets to open at dinner.

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.

The fall census numbers are in, and they are hard to read. On September 25, Higher Ed Dive tallied what major public universities are reporting on international enrollment. The University of Colorado is down 582 international students from last fall. Ohio State is down 12.7 percent. Indiana is down 15.6 percent. North Texas lost more than 1,300. Across the Universities of Wisconsin, 1,100 of a 1,732-student decline were international students.

Then the University of Maine System did something most institutions avoid. It put a price on it. Losing 100 out-of-state students, administrators said, costs $7.2 million over four years.

I am not an immigration attorney or a visa policy expert, and I will not pretend to be. Those decisions are made far from campus, and no president, provost, or chief business officer in America controls them. So let me set that ledger down and pick up the other one.

Every campus in those headlines is also losing students it can control. They are already admitted. They already moved in. They are sitting in a residence hall tonight deciding, quietly, whether they are coming back.

The Ledger Nobody Is Holding a Press Conference About

Maine’s arithmetic is worth reading twice, because it works in both directions. $7.2 million across 100 students is $72,000 per student over four years, or about $18,000 a year. That is what one student leaving costs. It is also what one student staying is worth.

Now look at your own first-year class. If it is 2,000 students and your first-to-second-year retention is 80 percent, 400 of them will not be back next fall. Nobody will write a news story about those 400. There will be no roundup and no federal policy to point to. They will simply not re-enroll, one at a time, for reasons that rarely show up on an exit survey.

One point of retention on that class is 20 students. Each one who comes back as a sophomore brings three more years with them. Three points is 60 students. Multiply by the net tuition, room, and board you keep for every student who returns, and you have a number that belongs in the same board presentation as the international decline.

We are subject matter experts, so let us run the numbers for you, with your class size, your net revenue per student, and your retention rate. On most campuses the result is larger than anyone in the cabinet expected, and it dwarfs the line called remuneration from campus dining.

Where the Controllable Students Are Decided

Over the past thirty-six years of interviewing newly minted freshmen, I have asked what they were looking forward to about college back when they were high school seniors. The answer comes back in two words, almost universally: freedom and social.

Colleges and universities have long known that when a new student connects socially within roughly the first 45 days, the odds of returning as a sophomore rise sharply. For the class that moved in this August, that window is closing right now. By the time the board meets in October, most of next fall’s attrition has already been decided. Not in the registrar’s office. At a table, or in the absence of one.

So ask the question I ask on every campus: where, physically, are those friendships supposed to form? Not the classroom, where talking to your neighbor is a disruption. Friendship is produced by repetition without obligation: the same faces, at the same tables, at the same hours, until the accidental third dinner with the same crew quietly becomes a friend group. Only one venue delivers that two and three times a day for four years. It is the residential dining program, the last Big Mix, and it is already in your auxiliary services portfolio.

The phone call that precedes a lost student is not “send money.” It is “Mom, I haven’t really found my people yet.” Every enrollment manager knows what that sentence becomes by spring.

What the Controllable Side Requires

The room already exists. The students already walk in with a paid meal plan. What separates a dining program that holds students from one that loses them is not capital. It is a set of decisions.

The institution owns the vision, not the operator: a granular picture of what a world-class residential and retail dining program is on this campus, by location, method of service, daypart, meal plan, and brand portfolio. Do not abdicate your responsibility to an FSP’s sales team. You may rue the day.

The program runs on the Student Clock and on Abundance Thinking. Hours that match when students are actually free. Stations that stay full until the posted close, on weekends too. Table configurations that invite joining, so that sitting alone is a choice rather than a sentence.

And it is measured by the outcome the mission cares about. Voluntary participation is the purest measure of value. If your residential commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges in retail propping up the count, you have a Social Coliseum, and you are watching retention happen in real time.

Across nearly 500 campuses over more than three decades, many of our clients have reported that student retention increased by 1 to 3 points after their programs were rebuilt through SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™. Hold that next to the arithmetic above.

Our mini documentary, SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, was filmed 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. Those are the students on the controllable side of the ledger.

Two Columns for the October Board Meeting

The leaders at the campuses in those headlines are doing exactly what they should: reporting hard numbers honestly and planning around them. The question is for every campus preparing its own board report this month.

Bring two columns. In the first, write the number of students you lost this fall to forces you could not control. In the second, write the number of first-year students who will not return next fall, and what each point of that number is worth over the three years that follow. The first column is news. The second is a decision.

In the Big Dance, where families choose among hundreds of academically interchangeable schools, you cannot recruit your way out of a door that is open at the back. The students you can still keep are on your campus tonight. Whether they stay is not only solvable; it is preventable, and the single most potent day-to-day catalyst for engagement, belonging, retention, and persistence is already yours. Organize it through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking, and then walk through the dining commons at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and count the students who found their people.