A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement compares an opt-out meal-plan default against a hall that still requires active reconfirmation, and finds retention and redemption running in opposite directions.
A two-hall comparison finds an opt-out renewal keeps enrolment steady while actual redemption moves the other way
One hall’s meal plan renews itself unless a student says otherwise. A short walk away, a second hall still asks. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement set the two arrangements side by side and looked at what happens after the form is signed, or isn’t.
Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Mirela Hanke tracked swipe-card redemption across both halls for the Feb-Jun term, matching each hall’s own retention count against how many of its paid meals were actually collected. The auto-renewing hall held 96 per cent of its plan-holders enrolled through the term, against 71 per cent at the hall that still requires active confirmation. Redemption ran the other way: 61 per cent of paid meals collected at the auto-renewing hall, against 84 per cent at the hall where students keep choosing back in.
The card doesn’t know whether the tray came back. Only the redemption log does.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Mirela Hanke, whose work follows an indicator’s drift from measurement instrument to decision proxy, said the gap fits a pattern she has traced for years: a number that “keeps reporting success long after the thing it was built to track has quietly moved on without it.”
The Living Dashboard’s own retention tile does not distinguish the two figures; both halls currently register as “near capacity” under the same measure. The University reads the comparison as exactly the kind of small accounting its evaluation-ecosystem agenda exists to run, and says a redemption-weighted tile is under consideration ahead of the default’s wider rollout.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8ww6eg.