With the increase in students at the school this year, it’s obvious that the current access to transportation and food is just not cutting it for students, especially financially independent and international students.
According to the Beloit College website, Beloit is “a close (and affordable) Van Galder bus ride away from Wisconsin’s bigger cities. Janesville, Rockford, and Madison are around an hour away, with Milwaukee and Chicago, IL, being less than two.” The buses run frequently to O’Hare and Madison, and there are no direct rides to Milwaukee from Beloit via the Van Galder bus.
But, how does the college facilitate these rides? The answer is the college mostly relies on you having a safe way home; whether it be a ride from a friend, a rideshare app, or a brisk walk back to campus.
Eric Sharlow, Head of Security at Beloit College, wrote to me that security will only pick a student up from the FasMart bus stop in South Beloit if the student fears for their safety. Understandably, this is for safety reasons, as security needs to be available and near campus to respond to campus-related emergencies.
Residential Life provides shuttles during breaks, but often during regular business hours. And, if you’ve ever flown, you’d know the cheapest flights don’t get to O’Hare at “regular” times.
When I reached out to Residential Life about shuttle accessibility, I did not receive a response.
So, it’s much more accessible and reliable to drive to school for the year, given the student has the means. But, why else do students bring cars? Besides convenience for sports and off-campus work and extracurricular activities, the main “driver” of driving is food.
Now, this observation is from speculation and my experience as a student. But, I can confidently say that among my circles and classes, my peers express frustrations with access to food.
Residential Life offers bi-weekly shuttles (sometimes three or four times a week) to the Walmart in Beloit. However, any student at Beloit knows to expect an email from Randi Mogul, Director of Residential Life, regarding the cancellation of a shuttle for the night. Nov. 9, Oct. 22, and Oct. 8 are recent days, at the time of writing, the shuttle has been cancelled completely, day-of.
Especially in the cold weather, students should not have to put up with the inconvenience of waiting for a late, delayed, or cancelled shuttle for as long as an hour.
The closest grocery store to campus is a Piggly-Wiggly, which is approximately a 40 minute walk. This is why people rely on rides and cars for groceries.
Reliance on cars has only increased since the removal of the flex vending machines in the basement of the Powerhouse, the school’s dining hall. Even more so since those vending machines moved from Pearsons, open 24 hours a day, to the Powerhouse, only open until 10 p.m. at the latest on weekends.
NOTE: there’s a smaller vending machine in Pearsons, installed late Fall Semester, that offers yogurt and other perishable items.
For non-dining hall meals and snacks, students seem to have no other choice than to hitch a ride or drive themselves to a grocery store or restaurant. From my experience, busy students go out to eat a lot, whether it’s because of dislike of the dining hall food, short dining hall hours, or a combination of both.
Students are literally going broke spending extra money on food. Since 2019, food away from home has inflated by 37.5%, compared to the data of all food price inflation of 28.4%, according to the Purdue College of Agriculture. A dollar in 2019 pays for $1.29 as of September 2025, according to the Consumer Price Index.
Normal inflation of the U.S. dollar and the lack of inflated salaries alone leave students more vulnerable, even compared to 2019. The extra increase in food away from home only makes it worse for Beloit students who may not have access to time or resources to cook meals and snacks.
So, to the Beloit institution, I propose two things: better and quicker access to transportation and food. Let’s spend time and energy to figure out what’s working, and what we can do better to take care of our students/peers. Work with students to help arrange paid or volunteer positions to aid in student transportation. Bring up issues with alumni, let them offer their money and resources to increase student quality of life.
To Beloit students, I propose that we who have cars must inconvenience ourselves and run errands with friends without cars. Pick someone up from FasMart after break. Bring your sick friend soup instead of letting them waste their money on DoorDash.
“If you want to live in a village, you have to be a villager,” says Devin Cuffy-Bethel’26, a dear friend of mine. She says this in the context of Theta Pi Gamma, encouraging siblings to volunteer themselves to help out the organization. Theta is a valuable resource for me to rely on my community, and for my community to rely on me. But I want every Beloiter to see what a community can really do for them, regardless of group affiliation or a semester dues payment.
I want Beloit College to be an institution that takes care of everyone aggressively. While funding that goes to support renovations and larger improvements is very valuable, what I, among many other students, want to see is active change. We want to see improvements to quality of day-to-day life, and we want to see it now.
Image credit: Vivian Kopka’27
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