Tuition remission…okay, now what?

Tuition is only $1747 a year.  But then comes the other part…austerity budgets and as state support dwindles, one aspect is that creative cost shifting flourishes.  The tripling of student debt since 2004 are discussed here. And graduation rates remain flat.

From the chart provided at Umass Amherst bursar’s office per semester costs are shown, excluding room and board, which is worth a different post as to how that impacts which colleges are chosen.

Pro Publica Hidden charges and tuition for college

This week, anxious high school seniors will be opening letters and emails of acceptance or rejection. For them, there will be a mix of joy and disappointment. But for those students and their parents, there will also be an initial reckoning with the expensive, often opaque issue of college fees.
Lauren Vaughn, a senior at UMass Amherst, is also an organizer for the UMass Students Against Debt coalition. She said appreciating the collective cost of additional school fees is often critical to determining whether any particular school is, in fact, affordable.

“It does seem as though we are not informed about these fees often until it is too late,” Vaughn said, noting that such fees “can be the thing that puts some students who are financially strained over the edge.”

The federal government has made efforts in recent years to make true college costs more transparent. U.S. Department of Education data shows that in more than half the states across the country, degree-granting institutions reported that fees comprised a greater portion of combined tuition and fees in the 2010-2011 school year than they had in 2008-2009.

But fees for specific programs and courses typically get left out of that data. The same goes for fees that apply to specific pockets of students, such as honors students or international students.

Many school officials say they do their best to make sure the necessary information about tuition and fees is clear to students and their parents. But there’s no one definition that schools stick to when deciding what’s covered by tuition and what falls under fees, and the very structuring of tuition and fees can vary wildly between different schools.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors in some ways, the issue of tuition and fees,” said Terry Meyers, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary. “It seems to be one area of the academic world where no one is looking and no one wants to look too closely.”

To best appreciate how confusing — even upside-down — the world of college costs can get, consider this: At state schools in Massachusetts, where the state board of higher education has held tuition flat for more than a decade, “mandatory fees” wind up far outstripping the price of tuition. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship of the UMass system, mandatory fees are more than six times the cost of in-state tuition.

And that isn’t the end of it: Students are then hit with still more charges — the $300 “freshman counseling fee,” the $185 “undergraduate entering” fee, and several hundred dollars more if your parents or siblings attend freshman orientation. Honors college and engineering students face still more fees.
A number of forces are driving fees upward. For public institutions, declining state support has left many schools scrambling to find other types of revenue. As well, since the notion of straightforward tuition hikes is often politically toxic, there is considerable appeal to using fees to make up shortfalls.