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Do you pay too much for Crunchy Chicken Cheddar Wraps?
Many students utilize on-campus dining options like those in The Underground.
File Photo/KANSAN
▶ CHANDLER BOESE
@Chandler_Boese
The Crunchy Chicken Cheddar Wrap is one of the most popular and well-known snacks offered on campus, but at $5.50, some students consider it a little pricey.
At Wendy's, the Crunchy Chicken Wrap is $1.99, which is comparable to the snack-size version of KU Dining's wrap at $2.50. However, the specific recipe of the wrap is a Dining original, so an exact comparison is hard to make.
"If they weren't so expensive, I'd have a wrap right now," junior Jamie Hudson said when the Kansan spoke to her in the Underground last week.
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There are so
many places around where we can get stuff cheaper because we're students, but when we're on actually on campus, we have to pay more."
Items like the wrap are made and sold by the University's dining services at locations like The Underground, The Market or DeBruce Center, which thousands of students take advantage of everyday. These items differ from the ones made at dining halls because students pay for them individually, as opposed to paying a fee for a meal they choose.
Jamie Hudson
Junior
Sometimes a student might pay more than they would for a similar item off-campus, but Assistant Director of Retail Dining Alecia Stultz said Dining tries to keep those prices as low as possible, especially because extra profits don't really benefit them as a non-profit corporation.
Moreover, Stultz said, Dining doesn't get subsidies from the state or University to support its operations, so they rely entirely on what they get in revenue.
"What revenues we do make go right back into our units," she said. "They don't go to pay a contract company, they don't go to pay other things like that."
While student dining plans go through a process of approval before they're charged to students, the food services that most students use, like The Underground, The Market or DeBruce Center, don't have the same amount of input to determine its prices.
Instead, it's a numbers game of balancing prices that the Dining offices are doing almost constantly, Stultz said. Dining looks at what its costs are for delivery, ingredients, staff and more, and then they compare those costs with similar dishes at local restaurants.
"Every year we go out onto the street and we look at our competitors. We look at the closest competitors that we can to the products that we serve," she said. "Although it's really difficult to compare apples to apples, depending on what things are called. For example, a hamburger means five or six different things depending on where you go."
Stultz said its prices are sometimes higher for its on-campus franchises like Chick-Fil-A, because of delivery costs. They also have University-specific menus for places like Brella's, which Stultz said has a lot more flexibility. But in most of the fresh food they sell, she said she feels like Dining is pretty competitive.
For several different products, the on-campus versions do tend to be fairly close to off-campus versions.
At 'Za Pizza, a personal ultimate pizza costs $5.25,
while the Lawrence Pizza Hut sells its personal supreme pizza for $4.79,
according to its website. A medium drip coffee from an on-campus Roasterie would cost a student $2.15,
while FastFoodMenuPrices.com has a medium Caribou Coffee listed as $2.05 for Kansas.
Hudson said she feels like the chicken and pizza are not too bad, but she wishes the drinks and wraps were cheaper.
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"It just seems so dumb to me because there are so many places around where we can get stuff cheaper because we're students, but when we're on actually on campus, we have to pay more," she said. "But we're not really going to get off campus for food, so we're kind of stuck with it."
DEBT FROM PAGE2
ing ahead, we and the other Regents universities would of course like to see a more stable state budget situation."
According to Frisbie, the University's total debt service, which includes the ongoing central district constructions, Jayhawker Towers renovations and construction of the new energy and environment building, is about $770 million, the highest of all Regents universities.
The University isn't the only one who continually takes on more debt service, though, Frisbie said. Kansas universities rarely
get direct funding from the legislature for capital improvement, so they must fund it all through bonds. She attributes that to the state budget crisis, as well a less-tangible shift in the statehouse.
This amounts to a large debt among Kansas universities, which has increased more than 1,000 percent since the 1990s, according to the Capital-Journal story.
"It's also partially a change in mindset from our policymakers and where they view their role to be in providing capital for state universities," she said.
sas' finances, is a concern for the Regents, Frisbie said they don't have plans to stop approving universities' bond requests. She said that bonds, or debt, are not necessarily bad in and of itself, and the Regents understand that capital improvements are a high priority for Kansas universities.
"We want to encourage universities to keep making these changes and improvements in their campuses," she said. "We watch things like the state finances and a university's debt really closely and believe that we're still in a good place where it's OK to get these bonds."
Though the debt, as well as the general state of Kan-
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