The College Meal Plan Scam

A couple of weeks ago, Indian news outlets started reporting on a supposed scheme underway across the world in Palo Alto, California. “Students 'Pretend to Be Jain' to Skip Stanford's Rs 7 Lakh Meal Plans,” said NDTV’s headline. “Stanford’s Jainism Loophole: Why Students Are Lying to Reject $7,944 Campus Meals,” wrote the Financial Express. 

The claim first surfaced in an opinion piece in The Times by Elsa Johnson, a junior at Stanford, about the influx of special accommodations at elite institutions, noting that 38% of undergraduates at her university were receiving some kind of disability assistance. Johnson, herself a beneficiary of disability housing assistance due to endometriosis, decries the ease with which students can now claim “less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety,” to finagle a single room, some extra time during exams, or a few extra absences. 

The mention of the meal plan scheme was merely an anecdotal footnote in her criticism of a system that’s seemingly become too lenient. She claims that Jainism — a religion which rejects all food that may harm living creatures, including insects and microorganisms — has become somewhat of a hall pass for cutting costs. “The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes,” she complains, “while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from ‘mushroom mix.’”