Julie's Haircut
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2015
Game day, or college visits or an event where folks were invited to the campus; yea there'd be families eating at the food court. But it would be weird for Smith family just traveling through town to pop in for dinner.
DW and I are admittedly weird and like to visit large university campuses during our travels. We don't go too far out of our way to do so, but if the college is in the vicinity or along the way, sure.
We sometimes eat while we're there. Every large university dining hall we've visited was open to the public. There are always plenty of visitors on campus for various reasons. Plus most large colleges have food courts in the student union and/or in the bookstore building. The variety of food available has certainly increased exponentially since the time I was in school.
In the stone age we had a paper meal ticket that student workers in the lobby would manually punch a hole with a device over the appropriate date. We had to wait in line towards the end of the month at the Bursar's office to get the next month's meal ticket. Freshman living on campus were required to buy a full plan, 19 meals per week. (Saturday and Sunday were brunch and dinner only.) They also had a Monday to Friday lunch plan for commuters. Upperclassmen could choose a several other plans with fewer meals. If you lived in campus housing you HAD to buy one of the meal plans. The dining hall was open to the public, and there was a cash only snack bar in the student union.
Some of the places we've visited in the past five years:
U of Florida, Gainesville
U of Minnesota, Minneapolis
U of Tennessee, Knoxville
Harvard, Cambridge, MA
U of South Carolina, Columbia
U of Washington, Seattle
North Carolina State, Raleigh