After a decade of student advocacy, UC Santa Barbara’s meal swipe program will now allow students to rollover up to three unused meals per week. In addition, students have up to five guest meals each quarter.
YDSA advocated for meal swipe rollovers by first putting out a petition signed by 2,000 people. Nexus file photo
This new program is the result of advocacy from UCSB’s Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), who sent out a petition in early 2024, gaining over 2,000 signatures. The petition resulted in the University launching a pilot program, where a random sample of 10% of meal plan holders were opted in to test the meal swipe reforms.
UCSB was one of two UC campuses, alongside UC Berkeley, that did not have meal swipe rollovers. UCSB’s meal plans are divided into three types: Gaucho Silver, which includes 10 weekly swipes and three guest meals; Gaucho Gold, which includes 14 weekly meal swipes and four guest meals; and Gaucho Platinum, which includes 19 weekly meal swipes and five guest meals. Each plan can only rollover up to three unused meal swipes per week and meal swipe rollovers expire each quarter.
YDSA’s co-chairs, third-year religious studies and Black studies double major Ciara Johnson and fourth-year biochemistry major Michael Collin, said YDSA’s advocacy began in the fall of 2023, when they began by going door to door at on-campus residence halls to survey students’ experiences with meal plans.
“We were asking, ‘Hey, how many meal swipes do you use per week? Do you ever skip meals on purpose because you don’t have any meals in your meal plan? Did you have to go down on meal swipes in order to qualify for EBT and how is that affecting you?” Johnson said.
After surveying the residence halls, they started their petition and hosted a town hall that garnered more attention for the reforms. The administration then reached out to begin negotiating YDSA’s demands, resulting in the University launching the pilot program in the fall of 2024. The pilot program included four meal swipe rollovers each week and three that students could donate to the Associated Students Food Bank.
After a year of the pilot program, Collin said the University approached the YDSA and specified rollovers “[don’t] come at much of a cost for the University,” so it implemented the program for all students. According to Collin and Johnson, the rollovers do not come at an increased price for meal plans.
Collin spoke about how the lack of meal swipe rollovers was a large part of how the University profited from meal plans.
“They are counting on students to not use all of their meals, so it wouldn’t make sense to have it roll over,” Collin said. “After [the pilot program] happened, they found that it wasn’t really coming at much of an additional cost to have rollover, because most students were using the majority of their meal swipes.”
Considering that 48% of undergraduate students and 31% of graduate students face food insecurity, Johnson emphasized the importance of University services that provide food for students.
“It’s proven that [the University has] the money for it. They’re just choosing to not invest it in students and in the student body because they don’t have any pushback,” Johnson said. “Through having the students who are paying for school here actually come together and talk about these things and actually be thinking about, ‘What can we do to actually force the University to act as a safe space for us?’, then we can actually see some changes happen.”
Collin emphasized the importance of student advocacy to achieve better fulfillment of students’ basic needs.
“I think it goes to show the power of not just students, but all of us as students and workers and members of our community coming together and what we can achieve by making demands of systems and institutions that already exist,” Collin said. “We have to come together as a large group of people to demand that [the University] actually takes care of us, our citizens, the people paying taxes and the people paying tuition.”
A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the Oct. 2, 2025 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
There are many plump starving college students in that photo.