WashU was named #2 for “2025 Best Campus Food” last August. (Ella Giere | Photo Editor)

Last August, The Princeton Review named WashU No.2 in the nation for “Best Campus Food,” up from No. 5 in 2024. The other five schools listed are the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (No. 1), University of Richmond (No. 3), Bowdoin College (No. 4), and Cornell University (No. 5).

The new rankings were released as part of the Review’s most recent edition of “The Best 390 Colleges,” which ranks the top 25 colleges in 50 different categories. For its 2025 rankings, the Review tallied the data from over 168,000 responses to an 89-question survey filled out by students at each of the 390 colleges.

“WashU is in our book due to our opinion of its academics and its programs — as well as how favorably its students rate it on our surveys,” Jeanne Krier, a publicist for the Princeton Review, wrote in an email statement. “It has been one of our ‘best’ colleges in this book for decades.”  

However, in the months following the book’s publication, there have been frequent complaints from students about food prices and availability. An independent survey conducted by Student Life last September found that almost three-quarters of respondents said they felt pressure to sacrifice health and well-being when planning meals. 

The article, which includes the survey results, also found that a student on the Platinum Plan would only be able to afford an average of two meals a day, and that most WashU meals do not reach the minimum caloric requirements recommended by the US Department of Agriculture. This includes the caloric totals of the example daily meals recommended by the Platinum Plan meal points planning sheet provided by dining services. 

To address these concerns, WashU has committed to a two- to three-year overhaul of its dining operations. According to the dining website’s Strategic Planning Section, this includes “reviewing higher Ed best practices, expanding All You Care to Eat (AYCTE) options, integrating national and local brands, adopting innovative technology, and reconfiguring meal plans to offer diverse options and price points.” 

In an interview with Student Life this March, James Dwyer — vice chancellor for university business services — reiterated WashU’s commitment to addressing concerns over prices and food availability.

“Going into this spring semester, we were really focused on affordability,” he said. “The thing that we’re doing [today] is really working closely with our suppliers to understand how we can increase and enhance the offerings that we have.”

For the past several months, dining services has been focusing on responding to student feedback. Following complaints about limited portions and the lack of buying power of meal points, WashU made a host of changes to its residential dining locales (Bear’s Den, Danforth University Center, and the Village) last semester, including introducing the All You Care To Eat (AYCTE) program at BD, expanding hours at BD and the DUC, as well as lowering prices on over 200 items at the start of the spring semester. 

In response to many student requests, an AYCTE “to-go” option was also added this semester for $10.95, allowing students to take what they want and leave the dining area with their food. 

“We’ve actually seen a ton of positive feedback this semester on the $10.95 to go option,” Dwyer said. “A high percentage of users are opting for that option, so we feel like they’re enjoying this as an option.”

Dining services is also looking to improve staff awareness this summer. According to Dwyer, over the past 12 months, dining services has welcomed new team members to the administrative team. He explained that dining services has “additional training” planned for dining employees over the summer. 

“We have a lot of new team members on board,” he said. “We’re really focusing on enabling them to be successful in their jobs and then [helping to] enhance the experience.”

In addition to training new team members, dining services recently hired a food service consultancy firm, Envision Strategies, to conduct an outside review of WashU’s dining offerings. The firm invited select students to give feedback on dining this year during two focus group sessions held on March 18. 

Dwyer also noted the difficulties in trying to accommodate different needs among the student body, especially as many students prefer to take their food to go.

“From a quality and choice perspective, it is complicated when you think about it,” he said. “The idea around [college dining] is that the dining experience takes place within the dining hall versus taking it to go. We are exploring how we balance those two things.”   

Last week, WashU also announced a 5.8% increase in tuition price for the 2025-26 school year and additional increases to the cost of meal plans. Because of the added cost to meal plans, there is now a ~$1,200 fee to convert dollars to meal points, up from $885 this year, if the allotted amount of meal points per plan remains the same next year. 

To address concerns about the unbalanced dollar to meal points ratio, dining is evaluating the possibility of restructuring the point-based meal plan system. The possibility of implementing a meal swipe-based plan, where students can swipe and receive their meal for a set number of times each week, is currently under consideration.

However, Dwyer stressed that WashU is not looking to make any changes to this system [meal points] for next year, and a meal swipe based-plan would potentially not be set into motion until around 2027.

Dwyer also mentioned that WashU dining stands out for its integration of retail dining locations into the campus food scene, such as Corner 17 at Whispers Cafe and Collin’s Farms at the Law Cafe. He believes that these restaurants set WashU’s dining apart from other universities’ offerings.   

“On a lot of other campuses, the retail element is there as a secondary piece,” he said. “But we’re different in that regard. Here, retail dining has become a highly integrated aspect of our dining program.”

He added that his team is currently working on addressing pricing concerns at these retail locations. Because retail vendors like Corner 17 are separate from residential dining facilities, dining services has less control over their pricing.

“We are having discussions with them on food cost, labor costs, whatever their expected margins are on their products,” he said. “We’re trying to get to a solution where we can provide a quality [and] good product. This is what people are looking for, [that] it’s going to meet the caloric needs, and it’s going to meet that price point.”

Beni Bisimwa, Student Union’s (SU) current Speaker of the Senate, and member of SU’s dining subcommittee said that he is glad to see that dining is listening to student concerns and responding to SU activism related to dining, but emphasized that more progress is needed.   

“We came back from winter break [and] prices were lowered, and I was like ‘Oh, this is nice, but there’s still an ongoing issue of dining.’ So this is not the end of our work,” Bisimwa said. 

Bisimwa added that one of the biggest concerns of SU’s dining subcommittee now is the limited hours and lack of dining options on the East End of campus. He encouraged all students to fill out a survey SU is conducting about the issue, in collaboration with dining services.

Similarly, Dwyer urged students to utilize QR codes throughout the dining locations to provide feedback on the offerings, and pointed to the Food Security Fund as a resource for students who may be running out of meal points. The Fund allows students to donate unused meal points at the end of each semester and distributes them confidentially to students in need.

He concluded that despite the challenges his team faces, they continue to find ways to focus on key issues and improve the overall dining experience.

“There are a lot of people that are working really hard on this to try and do the right thing on this, and to make this program a success,” Dwyer said.