As introduced in the last issue of The Islander, the ‘1,000 won Breakfast’ is a program that started back on June 1st. This is run by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs in combined efforts with JNU. Students and the Ministry each pay 1,000 won per meal, while the remaining cost is covered by the school.

Our university is not the only place where this initiative has taken place, as other 144 universities nationwide follow the same scheme. Whereas many of these other universities like Kangwon National University or Sejong University have reported having trouble financing the program and attracting more students to use it, in JNU there has been a different outcome. During its first month, the program saw great success within the population of students. So much so in fact, that it started operating steadily during the summer holidays, including Saturdays. At the start of the second semester its schedule expanded further, operating also on Sundays.

According to a survey conducted to 105 students by the JNU Press, 56% of them have used this program. Out of these users, 64.4% indicated that the meals were “very satisfying”, followed by the 28.8% who felt just “satisfied” with the service. More than half of the surveyed population mentioned that the main reason for using the service was “because the price is convenient.” On the other hand, the 44% that have yet to use the service stated that the main reason they don’t use it is because they commute to school and do not live in the dormitory, thus rendering it inconvenient.

Since this is still a recent initiative, there are still a few issues to address. For example, this is exclusively a service for students, but people from outside the school have come to use it anyway. To prevent this, the administration of the dormitories started checking the identity of the students by scanning the QR codes of their student IDs each time they buy a ticket for their meal.

The future of this program is still uncertain, but there is a sizable part of the student population that do indeed actively use it and benefit from it.