Students dining in the Blanchard Dining commons at Mount Holyoke College.
By Declan Langton ’22
Editor-in-Chief
Mount Holyoke changed its school-wide meal plan for the 2021-22 academic year. Starting August 26, the Dining Commons will be open from 7:15 a.m. until 10 p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Late night will now begin at 8 p.m. The dining hall will no longer be closed from 4-5 p.m. In previous, pre-COVID-19 years, the dining hall was open until midnight each night.
In addition to time changes, students will now each be allocated 25 meal swipes, instead of the previous unlimited meal swipes permitted to students in the 2019-2020 academic year. The 25-swipe plan was in place during the spring 2021 semester, but no communications indicated that the change would be permanent.
These changes were made public on the Mount Holyoke website and on flyers in the dining hall after August 1, the due date for tuition and room and board bills. These changes were not previously communicated to the Mount Holyoke student body. Additionally, the cost of board has increased by $222 since fall 2019, the final fully on-campus semester of the unlimited meal plan.
This is not the first time the College has failed to communicate a changing meal plan to the Mount Holyoke community. In February, 2021, the Mount Holyoke News reported that the switch to the 25-swipe meal plan also went unannounced. While the College announced other changes caused by the pandemic, “one thing that was never advertised were the changes to the meal plan,” Elizabeth Spy ’23 wrote. “I was shocked to see a totally new dining plan page that contains no note that there was ever an unlimited plan or that this meal plan is in any way different from usual. After asking around, I found that nobody I talked to knew anything about the change either.”