With the year drawing to a close and finals stress descending, there’s an anxious buzz around as students prepare for summer, say goodbye to their friends and still try their best to pass their classes. Piling on top of the dozens of other worries students carry with them is a new uncertainty created this year by the revised meal plan policy.

Instituted at the start of the 2015-2016 school year, a new policy restricting the buying and selling of meal points to only once per academic year is giving students headaches. Previously, students could barter limitlessly to help out a friend or just to make a buck off of something that would go to waste otherwise. The exchange of meal points allowed students more freedom over the rigidly set thresholds given by Washington University.

The change in policy has not only hurt students unilaterally by restricting their freedom, but also the way that the change was carried out—quietly without much notice—has led to many students unfortunately using their one-time exchange only to be left later with no recourse.

Imagine you were a student who did not hear of the policy change—as a significant portion of campus did not early on—and sold just 200 meal points in October to make some extra money to do their laundry for the rest of the semester. Come March, that same student finds themselves out of meal points already and has no way to buy more. While that student could hope for the kindness of their friends with an abundance of meal points, that should not be a burden put on either student.

When this concern is brought to light, the University usually reminds students that Bear Bucks can be used to purchase on-campus food. While this option does indeed give students some way to buy food on campus, there is a $1,000 cap on Bear Bucks per year—on top of the ratio of one meal point to one Bear Buck—leading students to pay more for the same food.

For the students with too many meal points, the options aren’t much better. Not only can students not sell more than once—forcing them to wait until the spring if they want to know for sure how many to sell—but they also cannot donate their extra meal points to charity. The University’s decision to prevent students from giving extra meal points to Swipe Out Hunger encourages a mindset of leaving money on the table so to speak when others could benefit so much more.

As an editorial board, we see no reason why students should not be able to make multiple meal point transactions. Allowing for free exchange is more beneficial to students and the logical plan. The only reason we can see to leave the current policy in place is that it allows the University to retain more money at the expense of students. The meal plan becomes a guessing game for students, with a wrong guess carrying economic consequences.

Moving to the 2016-2017 academic year, we encourage the University to reverse this year’s policy change and again put student experience above its own interests.