The college cafeteria has to deal with, at least, the intention or pretense of making something nutritious, but also that people will actually eat. K-12 school lunch programs face this problem too: Kids won't eat healthy food.
But yes, even when I was in college 30 years ago, some students figured out that paying cash at the cafeteria was cheaper than the meal plan, and they raised a stink about it.
America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route, which results in many meals which are barely cheap and not good. Of course, my culinary opinion is based on my personal taste preferences. But I mean, like, burritos.
I'm constantly complaining to my family that meat here (in the US... more precisely, the Bay Area) isn't tough enough. They tell me I'm weird, and meat in the US is soft because that's how Americans like it.
(Lest the phrasing confuse people, all of us are Americans.)
That being said, I think you did point out something interesting - the pricing and food quality doesnt vary much between different schools in similar situations (markets/locations). In what I've seen, this is because most of these are run by the same big corporate chains - Sodexo or similar.
I knew the chef at a previous employer, he used to like to make bets with people, “I bet you can’t eat £1 worth of food”.
He always won because at catering rates an egg was 2p and a rasher of bacon 1p. The money goes on labour and facilities, the cost of the actual food is a rounding error.
If memory serves, $11 dollars is roughly twice what a single meal is allowed to cost at a German university cafeteria. This is considerably cheaper than a typical restaurant meal.
the part that confuses me here is the "on a budget part". i attended two very different schools for undergrad, but the meal plan pricing and food quality was very similar. when divided by the total number of swipes, meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal. the food was not inedible, but it was far worse than an $11 meal would be pretty much anywhere else. both schools offered a la carte cafes run or chains that would take cash and charge about half that for a filling meal that was much tastier (and was able to accommodate pretty much any allergy or dietary restriction).
the universities will always say something like it costs extra to be make enough food to feed everyone without knowing who will dine there on a given day, but don't all restaurants face that problem to an extent? is there some genuine reason why it has to be so expensive/bad, or are they all just taking advantage of the mandatory freshman meal plan to subsidize other parts of operation?