- Okay, we're in very windy
Merrillville, 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 8,500 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 cost, the
university kept adding fees. We're gonna stop by the student center, which has a Chick-fil-A inside to ask students about these fees. Sitting in the back is Angela
Kinsel, a graduate student. She recommends the
waffle fries, by the way. And she works as a graduate assistant. So her tuition, it's
covered a hundred percent. - So I'm really only paying the fees, which is just as bad, so. - Why is it just as bad? - I'd say it's probably about, probably a third of my tuition. - Kinsel 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. - 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. - Do you feel like you're
being nickeled and dimed? - Oh, absolutely, yeah. - Why? - Throughout my five years here, it's just gotten worse, it feels like. And so really looking at the bill, it definitely makes you double, almost double take and be
like, is it actually worth it? (upbeat music) - This is college uncovered,
a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I'm Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. - And I'm Kirk Carapezza with GBH. - Colleges don't want you
to know how they operate. So GBH. - In collaboration with
The Hechinger Report, is here to show you. Today on the show, "Nickeled and Dimed." - 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. - 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. - 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? - Yes, I'd say that has
been a major takeaway, John. 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. - Well, as a result of tuition freezes, fees have gone up faster
than tuition over time. - Because it's usually easier to increase or add new fees than tuition. - Of course, that's right. - I know you've done quite a bit of reporting on this, John,
what do you see as some of the most egregious examples? - 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 charged,
this is unbelievable. One university charged what it called a free
anonymous HIV testing fee. - 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. - 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. - That's economist Robert Kelchen. Robert 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? - 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. - Think of it like a balloon, John. - 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 Kinsel got
at Northwest Missouri State, are full tuition, but
they don't cover fees. - And colleges and states often want to push charges into fees. So students pay for it
instead of scholarships. - 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. - 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 is the only way
that they can get the money. - Not having enough courses
or academic advising after all could cause
students to drop out. Kelchen says, careful consumers
should be on the lookout for things like mandatory athletic fees. - They can be very large
at some institutions. If we look at some of the institutions in Virginia and North Carolina, it's like a thousand dollars a year just to support athletics. - And John, you'd think it's the schools with big time athletic programs charging these big athletic fees, but it's not. - 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, through student fees. - 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. - Okay, for now. Kelchen says, all of these mandatory fees
make it really hard for families to calculate how much
college will actually cost. - They certainly don't help
that 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? - And what did the fees look like there at the University of Tennessee? - 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. - Okay, John, 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. - I'm terrible about parking fees. - Lucas Noker from Smithville,
Missouri is a freshman. - I racked up a bunch of
parking fees first semester. I think I had something over $200, which is kind of embarrassing 'cause the rules are pretty clear. - Full disclosure here, John, 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. (beep) Okay, 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 gonna, I'll try to expense this. - Good luck with that. You know this is public media, right? Okay, pledge now to help Kirk Carapezza pay his parking tickets. - It's gonna 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. (soft country music) - Okay, so to learn more about
how all of these fees work and how we got here, we
reached out to Jong Yun 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. - 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, as of last year, public four year universities
were charging about $1,600 per semester just in fees
for in-state students. - And that's typically
adding about 20%, 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% increase compared to that time. - And that steep increase in fees, well, Kim says it really
started about 16 years ago after the 2008 Great Recession. - When there is a great recession, oftentimes state is trying
to also cut their budget, which makes them to go
through the pressure of, okay, we need to identify which
functions we are cutting and like, you know, which
function we need to sort of, you know, like continue supporting. And unfortunately, I think
higher education is one of the areas the state
will consider cutting when there is a economic recession. - 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. - The names were something along the lines of tuition contingency fee, economic recovery surcharge fee. And basically some of
the descriptions was, 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, to the students. Which was very fascinating. - Fascinating, sure, Kirk, I
mean, if you're a researcher, frustrating, definitely,
if you're a student, especially one from out of state. - 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-A's south
of the Mason Dixon line and Starbucks to the north. They began popping up in student centers, usually right next to the cafeteria. - These students tend to
want to have, you know, those wholesome experience in
college, which means, okay, like, you know, we want 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'd be also coming from the fees? - 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. - 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 levels. So there will be fees for like lower level or upper level students, things like that. So that's what I called
nickel and dime fees. - There it is again,
Kirk, nickel and dime. - Many students at
Northwest Missouri State told me they were, shall we say, annoyed by all of the
nickel and dimeing 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,
Kirsten Peterson from Nebraska and her friends McKenna Odegaard from Iowa and Izzy Arias from Missouri. They had just eaten lunch
at the fast food joint. - 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. - My textbooks.
- That's true. I don't even use the textbooks. - Haven't opened them. - Yeah. - And you know, the biggest pisser for me was, we're paying
1600 bucks a semester and we have to live on, well, we don't have to live
on campus, some of us. - Freshman do. - First year - Being on campus, you
have to have a meal plan. And the cheapest one you can get is $1,600 for 10 meals types a week. I don't eat downstairs. I haven't eaten downstairs all semester. - So you're paying
$1,600 for the meal plan, but you're paying for
Chick-fil-A upstairs. - Yeah.
- Yes. - Which comes with like
the $500 dining dollars. - Which is nice, but still. - That's all I use. - Which just goes to waste. - Yeah. - I mean, yeah, we pay 'em anyways. And they're somewhat,
they somewhat make sense, but at the same time, like a
little unnecessary, I mean, well we had to pay $30
just to live in the LLC, but we're already paying like five. - It was 65. - 65 I guess. - 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. - We're already paying like
5,000 to live in the dorms, so why do we need to pay another 65? Like, you know, what is the point of some of those little things? - And if you want to use your computer when school is not in session, yep, you guessed it John,
there's even a fee for that. - Every summary you have
to pay $75 just to keep it. - That's Jolie Gain. A first year student, she
says, taken together all of these fees add up and they make the whole student experience feel much more transactional. - 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 'em
and then we have to pay 'em. 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 outta your dorm completely, everything's clean. There's still a fee if you
don't correctly check out. - Okay, so we did reach out
to the university to respond to these complaints and
the spokesperson declined to make anyone available
to meet with me on campus and then didn't respond to
several requests for comment. (upbeat music) - A handful of colleges
are listening to students and eliminating fees altogether. Jason Reinoehl is the vice president for Strategic Enrollment Management at the University of Dayton in Ohio. - And prior to that, I served in a assistant
vice president role and working with my predecessor, we uncovered some data
around the effect of fees here at AUD. And I was on kind of on point to help socialize the negative effects of fees on our students. - Jason, what kind of fees did the University of
Dayton have on its books? - Fees for things like
labs, course-based fees, extracurricular related fees. And then we had like a graduation fee. - And how much was that one?
- If I recall, it's been a little while. If I recall it was like $75 to graduate. - Okay.
- Yeah. - So what were the negative
effects of all of these fees? - You know, something
we did then, still do. And 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, they've successfully
completed their degree, they should be on cloud nine, right? Like 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 nickeled and dimmed because these fees were
surprises to them over and over. - On average, the survey
found students graduated having experienced 20 different fees. - Nickel and dimed 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. - Undisclosed fees, like what? - You would have things like
a school of business student who, you know, we'd 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 gonna cost you
$50 extra for this semester. Right? Like that type of thing. And 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 in a way to help drive change
across the institution. - So Reinhold says what the University of Dayton did was roll all of those fees into the
overall cost of college. - 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 wanna 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 in a way that they felt, you know, frustrated about. - Reinhold says this
was part of a larger set of changes the university
made to meet its commitment to improve price transparency. - We remove 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
it's one year at a time. - 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 gonna be your sophomore and then junior year. So you guaranteed the
same package throughout. - Yes, it 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. 'Cause 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 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. - Sounds on the level, right, John? - Yeah, and it helped the university too. Dayton's first year class
sizes grew significantly after the change and to this day. - But eliminating remains pretty rare in the land of higher ed. Economists say it's a lot easier for private colleges like
the University of Dayden to make these changes. - That's because, again,
private colleges are in control of their pricing strategies. But state legislatures set
the tuition limits at public universities and they
say that's why they have to jack up fees. - So if you're a student or a 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. - 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. - 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 any particular semester. The key here again, John, 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. - 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 couldn't
get you off the hook for that parking ticket. - Don't worry about it, man. I'm just gonna expense it to your colleagues over
at The Hechinger Report. (upbeat music) This is college uncovered from
GBH and The Hechinger Report. I'm Kirk Carapezza. - And I'm John Marcus. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to
GBHnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you wanna 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 and John Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Wolfhouse is our supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer, production assistant from Diane Adame. - 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. Malay is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts
is Devin Maverick Robbins. 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. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] GBH. (soft music)
