Students at one New York university have a surprise awaiting them: an $8,000-a-year “academic excellence fee.” We have to ask: Isn’t academic excellence included in tuition? In fact, tuition is only part of the cost of college. Like car dealerships, schools are nickel-and-diming consumers with huge fees — fees for student activities, fees for athletics, fees for building maintenance, fees for libraries, even fees for graduation, the bills for which arrive just as students and their families thought they were finally done paying for college.
Unexpected fees are frustratingly piled on top of a long list of expenses for college beyond tuition that many people never plan for or expect, or that can’t be covered by financial aid, sometimes forcing them to take out more and more loans, or quit college altogether. One study estimates that fees add 27 percent to student charges, on top of the typical cost of tuition. They’ve also been increasing far faster than tuition. That’s because some colleges and universities want to make tuition look like it’s staying flat, instead putting their increased charges into fees.
At public universities, many of these fees are added “temporarily” during times when state budgets are cut, but they seldom if ever go away. Graduate students bear a big brunt of them. Graduate students pay fees of $4,653 per year at Louisiana State University, $3,622 at North Carolina State and $3,160 at the University of Tennessee.
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TRANSCRIPT
Kirk: Okay, we’re in very windy Maryville, Missouri, population 12,000. It’s home to Northwest Missouri State, which is surrounded by farmland, cows, and I can see wind turbines in the distance. The public university has about 8500 students. Most of them live here on campus, and all of them pay substantial fees. That’s because the state of Missouri limited tuition increases for a decade. So to keep up with costs, the university kept adding fees. We’re going to stop by the student center, which has a Chick-fil-A inside, to ask students about these fees.
Sitting in the back is Angela Kinzel, a graduate student. She recommends the waffle fries, by the way, and she works as a graduate assistant. So her tuition, it’s covered 100 percent.
Angela Kinzel: So I’m really only paying the fees. Which is just as bad.
Kirk: Why is it just as bad?
Angela Kinzel: I’d say it’s probably about probably a third of my tuition.
Kirk: Kinzel is studying to be a science teacher. Like the rest of the country, Missouri desperately needs more teachers, especially in science and math. That’s why she can’t believe how many fees there are getting in the way of her graduating and earning a degree that will allow her to teach.
Angela Kinzel: Well, there’s a technology fee. Since I’m a graduate student, we have textbook fees, which is like $20 a rental. And then I live on campus as well, so dorms and the food that’s associated with that. There’s also a graduate fee, I believe. So, super fun.
Kirk: Do you feel like you’re being nickel and dimed?
Angela Kinzel: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Throughout my five years here, it’s just gotten worse. And so really looking at the bill, it definitely makes you do a double take and be, like, is it actually worth it?
Jon: This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report …
Kirk: … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.
Jon: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …
Kirk: In collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
Today on the show: “Nickel and Dimed.”
Jon: It depends on the school, of course, but colleges can charge you for basically anything, Kirk. From fees for campus services like a shuttle bus you may or may not use to student academic fees or athletic fees.
Kirk: Yeah. At northwestern Missouri State, it’s called a “designated fee.” More and more colleges are using these generic charges as substitutes for tuition. They use the revenue to pay for things like facility improvements, debt and sustainability, health and wellness.
Jon: So here’s the gist. In about 30 states, there’s some kind of control or limit on what public colleges can charge for tuition, but there’s less control over fees. So if you’ve been paying attention to our podcast, you know colleges always seem to find a way to get the money, right?
Kirk: Yes, I’d say that has been a major takeaway, Jon. Of course, going to college and earning a degree is worth it if you graduate on time and with less debt. College is good. More jobs in the future will require education beyond high school. But the higher ed landscape, it’s pretty rocky. And we found there’s a real lack of transparency surrounding pricing and, as we’ll explore in our next episode, outcomes.
Jon: Well, as a result of tuition freezes, fees have gone up faster than tuition over time.
Kirk: Because it’s usually easier to increase or add new fees than tuition.
Jon: Of course, that’s right.
Kirk: I know you’ve done quite a bit of reporting on this, Jon. What do you see as some of the most egregious examples?
Jon: I mean, my favorite is the academic excellence fee I found at one university in New York. I mean, you’d think that academic excellence is included in tuition, right? I’ve also seen academic building fees, academic credentialing fees, academic facility and life safety fees, arts and cultural enrichment fees — they go on and on. Bicycle path maintenance fees, campus environmental improvement fees, campus spirit fees — that’s a good one. ID card fees, safety fees and solar energy fees. One university charges — this is unbelievable — one university charged what it called a “free, anonymous HIV testing fee.”
Kirk: All right. There are also those fees that just annoy students but provide a revenue stream. So think about graduation fees and fees for transcripts. Colleges say it’s all to support the student experience.
Robert Kelchen: That there are colleges that will charge several hundred dollars a semester in an academic support or an excellence fee. And it’s basically tuition living under another name.
Kirk: That’s. Economist Robert Kelchen. Kelchen is at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he teaches higher ed finance. So during his office hours, I asked Kelchen: Why are colleges doing this?
Robert Kelchen: The first is, for public colleges, they often don’t get to control how much they raise tuition, but they may have more control over fees. And this is a way to get the revenue that they’re looking for.
Kirk: Think of it like a balloon, Jon. Okay, so you squeeze one end, right? And the other end expands. But the overall cost, it doesn’t go down. The other big reason, Kelchen says, is that some scholarships, like the one Angela Kinzel got at Northwest Missouri State, are full tuition, but they don’t cover fees.
Robert Kelchen: And colleges and states often want to push charges into fees so students pay for it instead of scholarships.
Kirk: Kelchen defends the practice — if colleges use the revenue generated from these fees to do things like hire more faculty or offer academic advisors. He says colleges are not businesses, even if they act like them sometimes.
Robert Kelchen: They’re nonprofit, mission oriented, but they also need the money to be able to pay employees. And if the money’s not coming from the state and enrollment is down, they have to get money from somewhere. And often fees are the only way that they can get the money.
Kirk: Not having enough courses or academic advising, after all, could cause students to drop out.
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Kelchen says careful consumers should be on the lookout for things like mandatory athletic fees.
Robert Kelchen: They can be very large at some institutions. If we look at some of the institutions in Virginia, North Carolina, it’s like $1,000 a year just to support athletics.
Kirk: And Jon, you’d think it’s the schools with big time athletic programs charging these big athletic fees. But it’s not.
Robert Kelchen: It’s the ones that are trying to keep up with them because they don’t have the same revenue coming in and they’re subsidizing basically everything through student fees.
Jon: So we understand that this is yet another part of the college process that consumers need to be aware of. And, Kirk, it can be overwhelming. But we don’t want people to worry. We’ll have a few tips on how to navigate all of this and potential solutions at the end of this episode. So stay tuned for that.
Kirk: Okay, for now, Kelchen says all of these mandatory fees make it really hard for families to calculate how much college will actually cost.
Robert Kelchen: They certainly don’t help. Students are going to end up paying the same no matter what. It’s just what they’re labeled under. And the big difference can be, what can they apply financial aid to?
Kirk: And what do the fees look like there at the University of Tennessee?
Robert Kelchen: We have some fees. And actually, the only increase we had to student charges this past year was in fees. Tuition was flat, but there were increased fees for facilities and to fund transportation. Because parking on this campus is an absolute nightmare.
Kirk: Okay, Jon, this is another thing that came up in my reporting at Northwest Missouri State. Students there say parking is also a nightmare, and campus police are pretty aggressive about parking tickets, which students view as just another revenue stream.
Lucas Nocker: I’m terrible about parking fees.
Kirk: Lucas Nocker from Smithville, Missouri, is a freshman.
Lucas Nocker: I racked up a bunch of parking fees first semester. I think I had something over $200, which is kind of embarrassing because the rules are pretty clear.
Kirk: Full disclosure here, Jon. I thought that the rules were pretty clear, too, and that I was parked in a safe spot. But when I left the campus center’s Chick-fil-A and headed back to my car, I noticed a little something on my windshield.
Kirk, at Northwest Missouri State: I just came back to my car, my rental car. I got a traffic and parking violation here, $30 fine, “no permit displayed.” I thought I was in the clear. So I’m going to try to expense this.
Jon: Good luck with that. You know, this is public media, right? Okay, pledge now to help Kirk Carapezza pay his parking ticket.
Kirk: It’s going to work.
There could be consequences, you know, if you’re a student and you don’t pay that ticket or the graduation fee or the sports activity fee. Some schools will withhold your transcript, even for relatively small unpaid amounts. We’ll post a link to some of our previous reporting on transcript holds on our landing page.
Okay, so to learn more about how all of these fees work and how we got here, we reached out to Jeongeun Kim.
Jeongeun Kim: I’m an associate professor of higher education at the University of Maryland. My research primarily touches on how universities and colleges are organizing their major practices and policies, including pricing behaviors in response to, you know, their environmental changes.
Kirk: Environmental changes, Kim says, include basic supply-and-demand economics. Her research focuses primarily on the mandatory fees that are required for everybody, but specifically full-time undergraduate students. And she finds that, as of last year, public four-year universities were charging about $1,600 per semester just in fees for in-state students.
Jeongeun Kim: And that’s typically adding about 20 percent, you know, to the cost of tuition. And if you kind of think about how it used to be, let’s say in 2000, that amount used to be only $680, which means, this amount has been almost 130 percent increased compared to that time.
Kirk: And that steep increase in fees? Well, Kim says it really started about 16 years ago, after the 2008 Great Recession.
Jeongeun Kim: When there is a recession, oftentimes states are trying to also cut their budgets, which makes them to go through the pressure of, okay, we need to identify which functions we are cutting and which function we need to continue supporting. And, unfortunately, I think higher education is one of the areas the state will consider cutting when there is an economic recession.
Kirk: What was really shocking to Kim in her research was that some schools were pretty open about what they were doing with these new designated recession-inspired fees. But they had all kinds of different names for them.
Jeongeun Kim: The names were something along the lines of “tuition contingency fee,” “economic recovery surcharge fee.” And basically some of the descriptions were, oh, the state cut the funding and we need to come up with somewhere to recoup the money, and you are going to pay for it, the students, which was very fascinating.
Jon: Fascinating, sure, Kirk. I mean, if you’re a researcher. Frustrating, definitely, if you’re a student — especially one from out of state.
Kirk: Yeah. And that’s because, after 2008, facing demographic shifts and shrinking student enrollment numbers, public colleges began fiercely competing for out-of-state students who they can charge much more in tuition and fees. So on campuses nationwide, to recruit more out-of-state students, colleges added more amenities. Think Chick-fil-As south of the Mason-Dixon line and Starbucks to the North. They began popping up in student centers, usually right next to the cafeteria.
Jeongeun Kim: These students tend to want to have, you know, those wholesome experience in college, which means, okay, like, you know, we want the lazy rivers or, you know, like, fancy facilities, which then, you know, drives the institutions to spend more on creating these resources and facilities. But, again, where do they find the money? That will be also coming from fees.
Kirk: Kim compares the rise in fees to cell phone bills with their roaming charges, or airline ticket pricing, with all of those add-ons and junk fees.
Jeongeun Kim: Yeah, higher ed is not much different, unfortunately. If you wanted to get your seats reserved, like, you pay extra. Like, almost the same thing. Even academic support at different academic level. So there would be fees for, like, lower-level or upper-level students, things like that. So that’s what I call nickel-and-dime fees.
Jon: There it is again, Kirk: nickel and dime.
Kirk: Many students at Northwest Missouri State told me they were, shall we say, annoyed by all of the nickel-and-diming going on. Students here have to pay $1,600 just for dining services, but many of them say they don’t really like the cafeteria food downstairs, so they eat the fast food from the Chick-fil-A upstairs. Here’s out-of-state student Kearsten Peterson from Nebraska and her friends Makenna Odagard from Iowa and Izzy Arias from Missouri. They had just eaten lunch at the fast-food joint.
Kearsten Peterson: I’m paying fees for things that I don’t even use or necessarily need, like my meal plan I’m paying how much for that I don’t use all the time? My textbook fees, I could probably go and order those textbooks for 40 bucks.
Makenna Odagard: You don’t even use the textbooks.
Kearsten Peterson: That’s true. I don’t even use the textbooks.
Izzy Arias: Yeah, and, you know, the biggest pisser for me was we’re paying 1,600 bucks a semester. Well, we don’t have to live on campus, some of us — freshmen do. But being on campus, you have to have a meal plan. And the cheapest one you can get is $1,600 for 10 meal times a week. I don’t eat downstairs. I haven’t eaten downstairs all semester.
Kirk: So you’re paying $1,600 for the meal plan, but you’re paying for Chick-fil-A upstairs.
Izzy Arias: Yes. Which comes with, like, the $500 dining dollars, but which is still, that’s all I use. What a waste.
Makenna Odagard: I mean, yeah, we pay them anyways. And they somewhat make sense, but at the same time, like, a little unnecessary. We had to pay $65 just to live in the LLC.
Kirk: LLC. That’s the living learning communities, which the university’s website says are designed to ease the transition to college life and provide support for personal and academic growth that encourages its mission of student success. Students here say they understand the institution’s stated goal, but …
Makenna Odagard: We’re already paying, like, $5,000 to live in the dorms. Why do we need to pay another $65? Like, you know, what is the point of some of those little things?
Kirk: And if you want to use your computer when school is not in session? Yep, you guessed it, Jon. There’s even a fee for that.
Joleigh Gann: Every summer you have to pay $75 just to keep it.
Kirk: That’s Joleigh Gann, a first-year student. She says that, taken together, all of these fees add up and they make the whole student experience feel much more transactional.
Joleigh Gann: I mean, I wish they would explain why they think we need the fees more because they kind of just give them to us and don’t really explain them. And then we have to pay them, because if we don’t, we don’t get to come here. I think it’s a little unfair that we don’t get to understand why we have them. Because a lot of people disagree with a lot of them. Like, there’s a $60 fee if you don’t check out correctly. Like even if you completely move out of your dorm, completely everything’s clean. There’s still a fee if you don’t correctly check out.
Kirk: Okay, so we did reach out to the university to respond to these complaints. A spokesperson declined to make anyone available to meet with me on campus, and then didn’t respond to several requests for comment.
Jon: A handful of colleges are listening to students and eliminating fees altogether.
Jason Reinohel is vice president for strategic enrollment management at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
Jason Reinohel: … and prior to that, I served in an assistant vice president role and working with my predecessor we uncovered some data around the effect of fees here at UD, and I was on kind of on point to help socialize the negative effects of fees on our students.
Kirk: Jason, what kind of fees did the University of Dayton have on its books?
Jason Reinohel: Fees for things like labs, course-based fees, extracurricular-related fees. And then we had, like, a graduation fee.
Kirk: And how much was that one?
Jason Reinohel: If I recall — it’s been a little while — if I recall it, it was, like, $75 to graduate.
Kirk: So what were the negative effects of all of these fees?
Jason Reinohel: You know something we did then and still do is we would do a survey of our graduating students and ask them about their experience. And the kind of the trigger moment for me in driving this change was the feedback we received in that survey. So we’re surveying students. Imagine the student is at a point where they’ve successfully completed their degree. They should be on Cloud Nine, right? They should be talking about how much they love UD and their faculty and all of this. And they did that. But then they also indicated how just frustrated and, you know, really ticked off they were about feeling nickel and dimed because these fees were surprises to them over and over.
Kirk: On average, the survey found students graduated having experienced 20 different fees.
Jason Reinohel: Nickel and dimed. It was their phrase. And so we captured that data, that qualitative data as well as some quantitative data. The average amount that our students were paying per year was $2,100 in these, you know, in a sense undisclosed fees.
Kirk: Undisclosed fees like what?
Jason Reinohel: You would have things like a School of Business student who, you know, would be taking a finance class and naturally, we’d want to get them a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Well, you know, so you’d start class and then all of a sudden the faculty member would say, well, that’s going to cost you $50 extra for this semester, right? Like that type of thing. And it’s not it’s not like that student can really say no to that. Like they need that access, right? We took the quantitative and qualitative data and put that together and in a way to help drive change across the institution.
Kirk: So Reinhold says what the University of Dayton did was roll all of those fees into the overall cost of college.
Jason Reinohel: As a person flying on a plane, like, you just expect to be able to do certain things when you’re on the plane. And that’s how our students behave as well, right? They want to fully participate. In fact, we sell the experience that way. We want them to fully participate. But we used to nickel and dime them on the edges. And in a way that they felt, you know, frustrated about.
Kirk: Reinohel says this was part of a larger set of changes the university made to meet its commitment to improve price transparency.
Jason Reinohel: We removed these surprise fees and at the same time, we also articulated the net price for tuition that our family would pay across all four years. And so we created a financial aid offer that, you know, for most institutions is one year at a time.
Kirk: Right. And that’s the bait and switch we’ve been talking about this season. Your financial aid offer your first year probably doesn’t equal what it’s going to be your sophomore and then junior year. So you guarantee the same package throughout.
Jason Reinohel: Yes. Actually, we fixed the net tuition. And so the net tuition the family paid in year one was the same net tuition they paid in year two, three and four. Because really, ultimately, it’s not the aid package that matters. It’s actually what’s out of pocket to the family that matters. Right? So we fixed that. And actually in order to do that, we had to eliminate fees because these these are significant. The $2,100 per year, we couldn’t have that level of variance and make a complete commitment to our families about the cost of the degree.
Kirk: Sounds on the level. Right, Jon?
Jon: And it helped the university, too. Dayton’s first-year class sizes grew significantly after the change and to this day.
Kirk: But eliminating fees remains pretty rare in the land of higher ed. Economists say it’s a lot easier for private colleges like the University of Dayton to make these changes.
Jon: That’s because, again, private colleges are in control of their pricing strategies. But state legislatures set the tuition limits of public universities, and they say that’s why they have to jack up fees.
Kirk: So if you’re a student or family trying to navigate the wild world of university fees, or you’re just trying to save a buck, what can you do first? Do your research and look on colleges websites.
Jon: Yeah, some schools are better than others, but most public colleges will list their overall fees, although they won’t always give you a clear breakdown of what the fees are actually used for. So ask for it.
Kirk: And once you do that and you understand what exactly you’re paying for, there might be ways that your full-time status is calculated a little bit differently based on the types of classes you’re taking. So you might be able to reduce the total amount of fees you’re paying if you’re taking fewer credits in any particular semester. The key here, again, Jon, is to ask. And sometimes there may be some fees that you can opt out of if you’re not using, for example, the cafeteria or the gym.
Jon: So the bottom line is, pay attention. Read the fine print and know what you’re paying for. Then ask questions. Which is what we’ve said throughout this podcast. And we’ve given you places to look for the info. Kirk, sorry we can get you off the hook for that parking ticket.
Kirk: Don’t worry about it, man. I’m just going to expense it to your colleagues over at The Hechinger Report.
This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …
Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher Ed.
This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistant from Diane Adame.
Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.
It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Thanks so much for listening.