> I can't imagine students paying $4 a couple times a day for a Starbucks coffee when they're paying with borrowed money. This is just grossly irresponsible.
When I was in college, undergrads would have to purchase a meal plan, which could take a few forms. You could have a designated number of meals, and buy things from the cafeteria that qualified as a meal (one entree, one side, one drink), or you could have balance of food dollars which could only be spent on campus. There were also plans that involved a mix of those two types of currencies, but the better plan was to get the food dollars (which were called Declining, for whatever reason), and use that to buy food, because that gave you more flexibility. You could spend Declining at the cafeterias, at the corner store, at the Starbucks on campus, it was literally cash that you could only spend on the campus and only on food.
At the end of the academic year, though, your balance gets zeroed out, no matter how much you have left in Declining. So every year starting in April or so, people would start buying stuff in bulk from the corner store or from the Starbucks just to get something out of the money that was going to evaporate. My senior year, my girlfriend spent like two hundred dollars on coffee beans and gave them to people as presents, because what else was she going to do? I myself spent like sixty bucks on fifteen pounds of sour patch kids.
No reason to not buy that four dollar coffee every day when the money's already spent and you're not getting it back.