Every spring, millions of college students watch the same thing happen to their meal plans: the semester ends, a balance of unused swipes, points, or branded campus dollars sits on their ID card, and the money simply disappears. For years that was treated as an unremarkable feature of campus life.

In 2025 and 2026, a coordinated group of plaintiffs' firms reframed it as something else entirely, an unlawful expiration of a gift certificate under state consumer-protection law. The theory is now live in court, and the recruiting funnel behind it is national in scope.

The most striking thing about this wave is not the legal theory itself but where it came from. It is the same plaintiff-side infrastructure (the same firms, the same recruited-student databases, the same eight-figure settlement math) that powered the COVID-era tuition-refund litigation. That machinery did not wind down when the pandemic cases settled. It was redirected.

The theory: your meal swipe is a gift card

The core argument is deceptively simple. A campus meal plan accessed through a student ID, whether the balance is denominated in swipes, points, dining dollars, or a branded currency like Cardinal Dollars or RU Express, is a prepaid, stored-value instrument. If that instrument meets the statutory definition of a gift certificate or gift card, then the consumer-protection rules that govern retail gift cards apply to it. Those rules, in most of the states being targeted, prohibit expiration dates and dormancy or service fees, and require small residual balances to be cashed out.

From there, the alleged violations write themselves: end-of-semester forfeiture of unused balances becomes an unlawful expiration; the refusal to refund small leftover amounts becomes a denial of a statutory cash-out right; and undisclosed forfeiture terms become a deceptive practice.

Plaintiffs pair the gift-card counts with state unfair-and-deceptive-practices statutes (Connecticut's CUTPA, the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, and New York's General Business Law §§ 349 and 350) plus unjust enrichment and breach of contract.

The remedy structure is what makes the theory worth the effort. The New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act carries mandatory treble damages and mandatory attorney's fees on a successful claim, and California, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Washington either ban or tightly restrict expiration and fees outright. With class periods reaching back to 2020 and entire residential student bodies in the proposed classes, aggregate exposure at a single mid-to-large institution can plausibly run into eight figures.

Two anchor cases are already on file

The first test came in Connecticut. In Ahsan v. Yale University, filed in New Haven Superior Court, the named plaintiff alleges that his Yale ID card “and/or a meal plan itself” is a gift certificate under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 42-460 and CUTPA, after he forfeited unused swipes and points at the end of the semester. The complaint was signed by Lynch Carpenter LLP and Brian Murray Law, two of the firms anchoring the broader campaign.

Yale has pushed back. In filings reported in late April 2026, the university asked the court to dismiss or strike each count, arguing that the complaint targets ordinary, widely used practices and fails to establish that a meal plan is a gift certificate at all. That motion is the first real judicial test of whether the theory survives the pleadings, and its outcome will shape how aggressively the rest of the wave proceeds.

The theory crossed state lines in December 2025 with Machcinski v. Rutgers in Middlesex County, New Jersey. The plaintiff, a Rutgers engineering undergraduate, alleges that his student ID is a gift card under N.J.S.A. 56:8-110 and that the forfeiture of his unused Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 swipes violated both the gift-card statute and the Consumer Fraud Act. Because New Jersey's remedies are mandatory rather than discretionary, Rutgers sits in the highest-exposure tier of any institution named so far.

From pandemic refunds to dining dollars

To understand why this theory surfaced now, follow the people rather than the statutes. Between 2020 and 2025, more than seventy universities were sued over the spring-2020 shift to remote instruction. The litigation found its footing when the Third Circuit, in Hickey v. University of Pittsburgh, reinstated breach-of-contract and unjust-enrichment claims and cleared the way for settlement. Pitt ultimately agreed to a $7.85 million settlement, one of several eight-figure-adjacent resolutions in that wave.

What that litigation produced, beyond settlements, was durable infrastructure: a bench of experienced plaintiff firms, a database of recruited students and recent graduates, and a repeatable playbook for certifying campus-wide classes. When the tuition-refund cases wound down, that apparatus was available for the next theory.

Two other developments lowered the activation energy. First, state gift-card laws kept hardening. New York extended its minimum expiration term from five to nine years, and California's SB 22 raised the cash-redemption threshold from $10 to under $15, effective April 1, 2026, the highest such threshold in the country. Each amendment widened the gap between modern gift-card law and legacy campus-account design.

Second, in March 2024 the federal government put the practice in writing: a White House junk-fees fact sheet warned that “at the end of a term, institutions can take any remaining funds without returning unused funds,” and floated rulemaking to force the return of unused meal-plan balances funded by federal aid.

Plaintiff firms now quote that language directly in recruitment copy. No final federal rule requiring the return of those funds has issued, however, the Department of Education terminated the cash-management rulemaking track in December 2024 without reaching consensus. With no federal regulatory fix and no obvious preemption hook, the pressure has fallen to private litigation under the state gift-card acts, where the strongest remedies already sit.

A national recruiting funnel

The pre-filing phase is unusually visible. Between late 2025 and April 2026, Lynch Carpenter ran a rotation of Facebook and Instagram ad creatives recruiting current students and recent graduates who bought a meal plan since 2020. The named targets read like a map of the campaign's priorities, Stanford, USC, and “private California” colleges; the University of St. Thomas and “private Minnesota” colleges; Seton Hall, Princeton, and other New Jersey schools; George Washington University; and umbrella frames for entire states. The funnels are lead-generation only, routing prospects to intake rather than to a filed case, a recruitment phase, not yet a docket.

The exposure map tracks three things: the strength of the state statute, the size of the residential population, and whether the campus currency forfeits at the end of a term. New Jersey and its mandatory-remedy statute sit at the top, followed by New York, California, Minnesota, and Washington, all of which ban or sharply limit expiration and fees.

Connecticut and the District of Columbia round out the active tier with narrower or more discretionary hooks. Weak-statute jurisdictions and public universities (where sovereign-immunity defenses complicate the math) remain lower near-term risks, though copycat filings are likely once the first settlement lands.

Why it matters

For higher-education institutions, the practical takeaway is not to predict who gets named next but to audit the campus-currency program before a demand letter arrives. The practices most exposed are familiar: end-of-term forfeiture of any balance regardless of how it is labeled, service or maintenance fees on the account, refusal to cash out small residual balances, and the absence of a conspicuous written disclosure of the forfeiture term. Rollover structures that quietly reset the forfeiture clock each year draw the same scrutiny.

For the broader class-action bar, the meal-plan wave is a case study in how litigation programs propagate. A theory does not need a new federal rule or a landmark appellate decision to scale, it needs a favorable statute, a sympathetic factual hook, and an existing intake machine. The campus dining hall happens to sit at the intersection of all three.

Whether the theory holds up will turn first on the threshold question now before the Connecticut court: is a meal swipe really a gift card? The answer will determine whether this becomes a settlement wave or a cautionary footnote.

See the next wave before it's a docket. The meal-plan theory didn't appear out of nowhere, it surfaced in ad creatives, intake funnels, and a hardening patchwork of state statutes long before Ahsan and Machcinski were filed.

Rain Intelligence tracks those early signals and maps them to the institutions and statutes most exposed. Book a demo to see what's forming in your sector now.