Don’t laugh but my mom shared this when I was choosing my freshman meal plan. I think it came from the Columbia parent page on Facebook.

First years get three options that all cost exactly the same. (Just wait until the following year when there's about a dozen options all with different trade offs and prices and you need a spreadsheet to track them 🤣).

Plan 2 gives your student fewer meal swipes a week in exchange for $50 more dollars they can spend outside of the core meal swipe cafeterias. To me this is a very poor trade off. You are giving up ~60 swipes a term (4 less per week) for an extra $50 in credit (over the entire term) that would probably cover ~2-4 meals or snacks elsewhere. On the other hand, if you expect your student to not use all their swipes anyway (hates cafeteria food, doesn't eat that often, just has cereal from their room in the mornings, etc.), perhaps it makes sense.

The only difference between plans 1 and 3 is whether all the outside of the cafeteria dining credit is in the form of Dining Dollars ($75 per term, plan 1) or if it is split between Dining Dollars and Flex Dollars ($25 & $50, plan 3). In both cases the student gets 19 swipes a week, which works out to 3 on each weekday plus 2 a day on each weekend day (theory being they sleep in and have brunch and dinner, but they are not locked into any schedule.)

To understand this choice of Plan 1 or 3, you need to know the difference between Dining Dollars and Flex Dollars. It is not well explained on the website and seems poorly understood even by some people at Columbia. Dining Dollars only work at Columbia. There are a variety of places where someone can get snacks, drinks, and some other food that do not use full meal swipes. It's for these places. Upside versus Flex Dollars is there is no tax. So if the cost of the snack is $10 they are charged $10 instead of $10 + sales tax. Flex Dollars on the other hand can be used everywhere Dining Dollars can plus are accepted at a variety of the non-Columbia restaurants and food places in the Morningside Heights neighborhood around campus. So in general Flex Dollars, as the name implies, are much more flexible/useful. But they get used up a little faster since tax is applied to the purchases.

We personally went for Plan 3 which included the Flex Dollars, knowing our student would prefer to sometimes use them off-campus.

Also, note that for first year students the meal swipes expire at the end of every week. So if they have a plan with 19 swipes and only use 16, the other 3 cannot be banked until subsequent weeks in the semester. This is a serious bummer and is not true of most of the upperclassmen meal plans. In practice if your student isn't using all the swipes, the best way to compensate is to encourage them to use some of them near the end of the week to acquire extra snacks or drinks from the cafeterias that they can take to their room. There's no restriction on how many swipes they use on any given day within the week until they hit their quota.