<p>I was looking at the course offerings on the Dartmouth website and for several of the science classes there is the added notation:</p>
<p>Supplemental course fee required.</p>
<p>I take this to mean that in addition to the very high tuition that you pay to attend Dartmouth, there is a "premium" added to take some classes. I guess it must be sort of like ordering the prix fixe menu at a restaurant, but if you order the lobster there is a $ supplement.</p>
<p>This was quite a surprise for me, but I'm new to this. Is this a widespread practice? Do you parents know of other schools that do this? Do any other of the Ivies do this? Thanks for sharing any info that you have.</p>
<p>I don't know about the Ivies, but I've seen these extra charges for various classes at several colleges. </p>
<p>Back the dark ages when I went to college (walking five-miles uphill both ways through waist-deep snow), there was a tuition fee, a room-and-board cost, and a nominal (I think, $30) student activity fee. Once you paid the tuition, you could take any course for no extra charge and take as many courses as your advisor would permit. Some colleges now charge extra tuition fees if you enroll in more than the recommended number of courses per semester.</p>
<p>The school I work at charges fees for lab classes, some art classes, basically anything that uses particular materials or resources which cost more than a regular class.</p>
<p>Nearly all the engineering programs charge an extra lab fee per semester. Same with the fine arts classes that use so much in the way of supplies.....theoretically you might not spend so much on books for these art courses, so it might be close to even there.</p>
<p>30+ years ago, the California Colleges and Universities had no tuition, to residents. The fees however made the COA about the same as the tuition for the other Div 1 schools.</p>
<p>Daughter is a student at Dartmouth and yes there are supplemental fees. D took chem this year and there was a supplemental fee of for chem 5 and for chem 6. These fees are sent on a separate invoice and mailed toward the end of the term which you take the course.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. On the one hand $30 really doesn't seem like much, but on the other, after charging $41,000+ for a year at Dartmouth, do they really need to hit you up with a $30 chemical fee?</p>
<p>my daughter is a science major at Reed, she also attended a private school that had book fees- not not lab fees.
Reed has student fees that everyone pays- I agree after paying $41,000 for tuition to be hit up with extra charges for labs seems penny ante.
can't they figure out how much lab fees are before hand?
Reed everyone pays the same ( after finaid) a drama major pays the same as a physics major. Once you pay your tuition, labs and art studio are open to you, health clinic and tutoring even ADD coaching. I appreciate that after the large bills for tuition they don't try to hit you up for whatever pennies are left in your pocket</p>
<p>At state schools lots of charges are extra- example everyone pays a computer lab fee even if you don't use it, everyone pays something to subsidize the gym etc. The difference is, they seperate out the charges, so you see tuition per credit as one amount but then about 5 different fees are tacked on afterwards. Its kinda like your phone bill, you know how they quote you one price but then forget to mention that there will be state, city, county, neighborhood taxes just for keeping the phone line operable, ( which for our 4 different cell phone numbers adds another $50 to a bill that was originally under $100)</p>
<p>Course fees aren't uncommon at all. My daughter also had them for many of her studio art courses at RISD. But those fees paled in comparison with the actual costs of materials for many courses (which ran several hundred dollars per semester) plus the cost of tools.</p>
<p>The differences in per-course or per-credit hour costs are mostly buried in the general tuition fees per semester. But I've seen some figures from my university that suggest that courses in, say, engineering cost the university twice as much per student as courses in the humanities. Any lab fees don't come close to covering such a difference.</p>
<p>Mackinaw, that's a really interesting point you make. I had never heard that before, but intuitively it makes sense that engineering classes would cost more to a university than humanities classes. I expect that the difference is by and large "hidden" in the tuition as an average cost, but it does make me wonder; is it fair to have kids who take mainly low cost classes "subsidize" those who take higher cost ones? Would it actually be fairer to have different tuition bills depending on what course you choose to take, or would this concept just be too destructive to the idea of offering a broad based liberal arts education? Interesting!</p>
<p>As a (former) department chair in the social sciences, I became aware of the cross-subsidies, wherein the social sciences and humanities in particular subsidized the science, engineering, and medical programs. The different cost structures are related to teacher salaries, teaching loads (generally fewer courses per faculty member in the sciences and engineering), class sizes, and costs of labs and equipment. On the other hand, the sciences, engineering, and health faculty have much more access to off-campus funding from grants and fellowships, in comparison with the humanities and social sciencres. But in my experience those externally-generated funds don't come remotely close to covering the added costs of educating students in technical fields. So there is still a heavy cross-subsidy of programs even after taking external funding into account.</p>
<p>There are practical issues in turning everything into a full "every tub on its own bottom" funding formula, in which each program within a university would charge fees (tuition, lab fees) to over its own costs. One relates to attributing costs (faculty salaries, admin expences, rent and equipment, etc.) to undergraduate vs. graduate instruction. Another (in state schools) involves separate prices for in-state and out-of-state students. A third is that a lot of the costs of operating a university are general overhead, including all general admin, amortization of plant, maintenance, security, library and information technology generally. Should these also be attributed differentially to each program (major)?</p>
<p>Another issue is whether students should be choosing majors or courses with "cost-per-course" in mind? There might be some perverse incentives if a student were deciding not to take a more technologically intensive course just to save money.</p>
<p>As a Dept. chair, I didn't mind occasionally reminding the central admin that our high-enrollment, low cost courses were subsidizing the rest of the university, but I can say that I didn't make much headway when I tried this. Moreover, they weren't very sympathetic to our trying to use "fees" (really a surcharge) on any of our small-class size more labor intensive courses. But even though we didn't have a tubs-on-own-bottom budget, I did try to align the number of course hours (hence credit hours) with the demand on faculty time. So a small senior research seminar would be a 4-credit course, not 3 -- and it would meet 4 hours per week as well, but 33% increase in student-credit hours generated was to compensate for the fact that faculty would be spending a lot more one-on-one time and grading time in writing/research intensive courses like those.</p>
<p>Mackinaw: Fascinating! Can you share with us some numbers -- the costs for student instruction in the various departments and schools? Do you think those differentials are particular to your university, or apply more widely across all universities -- private research universities (e.g. Harvard, Stanford), state universities (e.g. Berkeley, Michigan), technical institutes (MIT, Caltehc), LACs (Amherst, Williams)?</p>
<p>Im not a parent... but at CMU for art we often have to pay supplemental fees as high as $100 for supplies they automatically buy for us to use in required courses. Still, we keep the stuff afterwards (hammers, nails, etc) and our art dept. is underfunded, so we understand,,, even if I am in school only due to loans.</p>
<p>I'll be going to the University of NH in the fall and MANY of the gen eds have extra fees associated with them. Even the non-science ones. From what I've heard these cover things like packets that profs may make for the students, different supplies, etc.</p>