Raising prices is a tricky thing, especially in schools.

It’s a delicate balance of what’s best for the students and the institution at hand.

This Reddit post delves into one student’s experience of an institution setting a very unpopular increase in pricing.

Rewrite your prices to gouge money from students and bleed money out, a tutorial.

This is from over a decade ago when I was a student, but it never fails to make me smile even now.

The curriculum I was in is very particular to my country. It’s a two-year intensive program that usually ends in admission to the best schools in the country.

This sounds like it’s a top-tier school to go to.

This curriculum, like most of its kind, was hosted by a public high school (with a much larger population of high school students), and — important part — it was heavily STEM-oriented.

This high school, being downtown in a big city in a large area of nothing, had, in addition to the usual lunch room, boarding facilities that were mostly used by students in this curriculum, as the high school population usually lived in town.

When I arrived, the price structure was the following:

• boarding students paid a fixed price of about €62 a week for the room and all meals Monday morning through Saturday morning
• other students could eat lunch for about €4.30 a lunch, with a prepaid card. Easy enough. (I don’t remember the exact prices but it was in this range)

This pricing structure makes sense. Nothing too out of the ordinary yet.

In January of my second year, all boarding students were made to attend a meeting about a new price structure that would count everything separately.

• The room would be €29 a week, lunch and dinners would be €4.20 a pop, and breakfast would be €2 a pop.
• The resulting price would be an across the board 2% increase, which “is negligible”.

Wait a second — the math isn’t mathing.

Key word being “across the board” here. I still don’t know who they expected to fool. Obviously good STEM students would figure out instantly that for them, the week would now be €82, so a 33% increase.

There was an uproar.

The rest of the meeting was hearing over and over “it was validated by the school board.” As if boarding students had any representation there.

The parents were too far and the students too busy. And of course other parents and students would approve of what was essentially a discount for them.

So we were stuck with the new pricing. Okay. But we don’t pay for the meals if we don’t go, huh?

Aha! It sounds like there’s a plan afoot.

Remember: the school was downtown.

And it appears, the students needed much less the breakfast, lunch and dinner on site where there are tons of options in walking distance at a lesser price. Up to and including stocking up things in the rooms for breakfast.

The kitchen was DROWNING in stock and BLEEDING money through the nose. The school being public, buying the food was not a very flexible process they could change week after week.

Oof, a lot of food definitely went to waste.

It only lasted a few weeks [until] they came back to the old pricing structure, albeit a little higher (€65 per week I believe).

I still call it a win.

That was definitely an unexpected twist.

Let’s see what Reddit thinks about this failed price increase.

This Reddit user realizes how the school convinced some students to get on board.

Another poster said they’re sticking to the new plan of protesting the dining hall plus some.

Of course, a U.S. student shares how American schools ensure that no food goes to waste.

Unfortunately, even some schools don’t have students’ best interests in mind.

But at least the ultimate outcome did.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.