A Radical Idea for MIT Dining

So why do all of the 4 dorms need to offer breakfast? Let’s say 30% of the students want breakfast. That’s pretty much one dorm’s worth. Why not move all those students to one dorm????? The only flaw in this is the UA rhetoric that students should not choose dorm based on culture or dining – but I think that they already do. I chose Baker because it has a dining hall. People in EC chose EC because it did not have dining. I think that is perfectly fine – it is an essential part of the choice of where you want to live – it’s an essential part of the culture of the dorm. So why don’t we just let people shuffle around to what they want. I think that people would be far happier if they were able to explicitly choose which dining plan they want.

The Housing Office should put out a mandatory choice of what option people want – like they do with the freshmen survey. Responses would be mandatory and binding (see below):

I want to live in a Breakfast, lunch and, dinner dorm at $5,000/year
I want to live in a Breakfast and Dinner dorm $3,800/year
I want to live in a Dinner dorm $1,800/year
I want to live in a cook for self dorm $0/year.

Then HDAG would look at the results. If ~300 people chose option one, then one dorm with ~300 beds would become the B,L,D dorm. (At that dorm, the selected meals would be mandatory.) The students would help select which building that would be, taking into account the size of people that chose that option, and where a disproportionate share of the votes for that option came from. (Perhaps restrict the choice of buildings to only affect the 4 dorms with house dining now. Perhaps exempt McCormick, idk. But in making the choice of what to offer where aim to affect the minimum number of people. Actually that last option sounds best. Just calculate how many people would have to move based on what you offer where, and maximize that. EC, say, almost everyone would want to continue to self cook, so making EC self cook would minimize moves.) They would then do this for each level of service, starting up new house dining or shutting down house dining halls even, if need be. Whatever makes the least people move.

Then once HDAG decides which dorm offers which service, there would be a form of the readjustment lotto. You could only choose the dorms in the category you picked (in order to make the initial choice important; or maybe this is unnecessary, you can choose any dorm [in which case it is the normal readjustment lotto]), plus maybe (I have not thought this through) your current dorm, by which you would be accepting whatever service they offer. There would be no guarantee they could move you in, but since the housing office knew approx. how many student wanted each option there would be approx. the right number of beds under each option.

It is good for the housing office because they know very well how many people demand each option, so they can vary the number of beds in each option to demand. And then the students can choose which actual dorm to live in among the ones which offer what you want. Students would be for the most part happy because they got the service they wanted. They may have to move around, but at least they would be very likely to have the dining service they want. Culture at the new dorms would readjust and might become stronger, because almost everyone there wanted that meal plan. Cultures would also become more distinct because there would be more variation between the dorms. And its all based on the assumption that dorm culture depends on dining. And since we would target minimizing students who move, determining what service goes where is a mathematical problem, hopefully devoid of arguments of survey and representation bias.

Thoughts? Please forward. Permission to republish granted.

Question

(Question asked how select what each dorm offers?)

Well the whole point is that you don’t prespecify which dorm has what. The sole goal is the MINIMIZE THE NUMBER OF MOVES. Since we are minimizing the number of moves, what is chosen for a building is what most of the people WHO ARE IN THAT BUILDING NOW want (except in extreme cases). If your current building “voted” to have something you don’t want, you could choose to stay and accept it, or choose among the dorms which offer your selected option.

Since the moves algorithm would not apply to W1 and W1 is really the only place that offers lunch, it might end up being the lunch place. If, however, only ~50 people in all of MIT want the all you can eat lunch, that tells us that perhaps AYCE lunch would not be a good choice anywhere, even at W1.

We should also split hot breakfast and grab and go breakfast into 2 distinct options. There would still be an option to hold just dinner (not even grab and go breakfast) and a no-food at all option.

(Also I am operating under the assumption that the cost of a dining hall is mostly fixed. I’m guessing 80% of the cost is there if they serve 1 meal or 300. This is why we want to reduce the service that is offered to only what people want.)