MAHWAH – Students and faculty at Ramapo College of New Jersey are known to speak candidly about the nature of living on campus, often times referring to it by the nomenclature “suitcase school.” Students go home for the weekend, and the reason, in part, is the lack of dining options.
College Statistics
According to U.S. News, “Ramapo College of New Jersey has a total undergraduate enrollment of 5,618, with a gender distribution of forty-five percent male students and fifty-five percent female students. At this school, forty-six percent of the students live in college-owned, operated or affiliated housing and fifty-four percent of students live off campus.”
Food Options Breakdown
Currently, the options for food during the weekend on campus are not extensive. After Friday evening, with the exception of Birch Tree Inn and a four-hour time slot during the early morning/early afternoon Saturday where The Atrium is open, dining options at Ramapo are virtually nonexistent, and with the menu at Birch Tree Inn being far from varied day-to-day, it offers students little incentive to want to eat, and stay overall, on campus during Saturdays and Sundays.
Although Ramapo College offers six different dining options, including the Roadrunner Express Convenience Store, students who express the urge to eat around two or three in the afternoon on a Saturday are out of luck. The only option is the Birch Tree Inn.
Even despite the college’s recently well-received decision to add an on-campus Dunkin Donuts to its list of food options, the open hours falls completely in line with the rest of dining on campus, being that it is not open at all on Saturdays or Sundays.
Student Insight
Eric Nelson, 21, a recent transfer student to Ramapo College, is upset with the current dining situation on campus, stating, “As a student who only has seven swipes a week I usually try to save them for Monday to Friday.”
“However, The Atrium’s hours are limited on weekends so half of the time I end up swiping anyways because there’s no other option,” he added.
Students have two options for on-campus food currency are reserved to their “swipes,” a predetermined weekly amount of entries into Birch Tree Inn & The Pavilion, as well as “flex” dollars, a semesterly preset amount of Ramapo-exclusive funds used at the remaining four dining options on campus.
Nelson, a music production major at the college, also added, “On Sundays, a lot of students feel the need to order out because everything except Birch is closed, and nobody wants to have to use up a swipe every time they’re faced with hunger.”
Connor Farrell, 22, a student in Ramapo’s Ansfield School of Business, also expressed some deeply rooted concerns about weekend dining on campus.
[soundcite url=”http://ramaporecord.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Camelot-Ct-2.m4a” text=”As someone who lives on Ramapo’s campus and works long hours during the weekend, I find it hard to work my busy schedule around the dining hall’s limited hours that pressure students to go home on the weekend.” start=”0.00″ end=”0.13″]
What Can Be Done?
Although students express their disdain for the current state of dining hours and options on campus amongst each other, it seems as though no formal movement has taken place yet to make the college itself aware of the problems students face when it comes to weekend food options.
Students argue this can be remedied through multiple peaceful options such as:
- Contacting any of the head dining employees at the school, whose individual contact information is linked here.
- Begin an online petition using a platform such as Change.
- As a student, consult with your advisor to make your dining issues known to them.
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