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.
