A new meal donation initiative has commenced at Vanderbilt University offering students the option to donate meal swipes to students in need. The program is enabling those grappling with food insecurity to apply for and receive up to five meals per week through the university’s dining services and financial aid departments.

Georgetown University’s fall semester meal-swipe drive managed to double the number of student donations it received last spring from 538 to 1,092. The program enables donation recipients to access swipes directly from their GOCards — Georgetown’s student ID card — in an effort to both increase participation in the program and make the process more discreet for those individuals facing food insecurity.

Savannah State University has made the decision to stop issuing meal plans that include Dining Dollars, instead offering meal plans supplemented by students’ personal cash or Flex Funds. The decision to discontinue Dining Dollars was in part the result of a policy implemented at the University System of Georgia level.

University of Pennsylvania students have a new way to place mobile food orders on campus after the university’s dining services established an agreement with Transact to provide its Mobile Ordering app. Penn Dining launched the “Penn Eats” app at the start of the fall semester and will enable students to place orders from their mobile device and skip payment lines to head straight to pick up orders at both campus-run locations and the on-campus Starbucks.

A select number of San Diego State University’s chain of Aztec Markets campus c-stores will no longer accept cash payment beginning this semester. The SDSU campus locations included in the move to cashless payments will accept only card payments, the SDSUcard and meal plans.

Vanderbilt University has amended its meal swipe donation program to enable students to donate side items from campus dining halls on a year-round basis. The initiative, established last year, initially allowed donations during select periods throughout the semester.

Virginia Tech is the latest campus to install touchless biometric readers in its dining halls, deploying MorphoWave hand readers from IDEMIA. Virginia Tech is now the second university in as many weeks to announce its use of the MorphoWave product to enable student access to campus dining, following a release from St. Thomas University last week.