Help Trying to Understand American U's Tuition & total costs

Parent Cafe
1

Hello All - Thanks in advance for any help. I’m a stranger to the US college system. My son, US Citizen, is attending AU in the fall as a freshman undergrad. I’m trying to understand the total cost and on the AU website it’s laid out but is not super clear to me:

https://www.american.edu/finance/studentaccounts/Tuition-and-Fees-Information.cfm

Questions as follows:

  1. The tuition I see for full time 18 credit hours is $25,407. I'm assuming that's for the whole year?
  2. There are some mandatory fees of a few hundred bucks I'm not too concerned with
  3. Housing rate (he'll be double occupancy) is around $5k depending on location. Is that per semester?
  4. Meal plan rates...it talks about "250 Block Plan, 225 Block Plan" etc etc. What does Block Plan mean

Just trying to get a grip of approximate total costs

Thanks very much!
DD

2

The tuition and housing costs are per semester.

3

They don’t do a very good laying that out but I looked on the actual housing website for AU and it said cost you are looking at for room and board are by semester.

4

Thanks for the responses. Do you know what “250 Block” means in relation to the meal plan…is that 250 meals?

5

@DickDastardly – these numbers are from 2017-2018, but better lay out the per year costs – https://www.american.edu/financialaid/

This lays out the meal plans – https://www.american.edu/ocl/OneCardDining/mealPlan.cfm – the block number indicates the number of meals per semester, each plan also has some additional “Eagle Bucks” and “Dining Dollars” https://www.american.edu/ocl/OneCardDining/eaglebucks.cfm

6

I appreciate the responses thanks.

7

A block meal plan is how many meals they get that semester. They might expire at the end of the semester but your student can use them for any meal.