I go to Syracuse University. Here we have to pay for phone service, cable TV, internet access, tickets to football, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, campus parking (ranging from $500 a year for the main campus garages to $48 a year for south campus lots), laundry machines, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don’t even think about. A lot of people I know at other schools get quite a bit of this for free. On the one hand it ticks me off and makes me feel like I’m getting nickel and dimed. OTOH, I always wondered if schools that provide said items for “free” simply include the cost of it somewhere else at quite a bit more than face value–IOW, instead of paying $300 actual cost to the cable company, the school charges you double that and just uses that number in figuring out what room and board costs.
What do you other college dopers pay for? How do you feel about your school’s system?
Anything that a college gives ya “free” is included in the cost somewhere. Money has to come from somewhere. For example, we get “free” transit passes…but our bill includes a hefty transit fee. Same with Internet access and just about everything else.
A lot of the things included in inclusive billing are things that students and administrators have decided that everyone should have. We have the transit passes because our campus is pretty isolated from town. If passes wern’t included, a lot of kids just wouldn’t get them- and then they would whine about being stuck on campus and wreak havoc. So, we force them to buy them.
If anything, you are lucky. When you are charged individually, you pay only for the services you use. You don’t have to pay for a bus pass if you drive your car every day.
By the way, your parking is dirt cheap. Round here you gots to pay about $700 a year to park in the boondocks at the base of campus (and that is only if you manage to actually get a spot- an impossiblity after nine AM). I don’t even want to talk about what it costs (and what it takes to get a permit) to park near the actual buildings.
I like my school’s system pretty well. Even though it sucks that you have to buy some stuff that you don’t want to (like you have to get a meal plan if you live in a dorm), it does keep a lot of kids that have never made financial decisions before from thinking that they can do without some things that are pretty essential.
Same deal here.
I like the way my school handles finance, personally. The tuition bill is scarier, but they seldom hit you with fees for registration or any other stuff. I know people who ended up paying their college up to $7,000 more than the tuition estimate because of hidden fees. :eek:
Included in your rez fees & tuition: cable television, high-speed internet via their LAN, phone service with caller ID and voicemail, and a microwave and minifridge in your room if you stay in the dorm.
Paid for separately: tickets to games (although our football game tickets are incredible cheap, students pay $21 for a season pass to 7 games that, for a non-student, cost more than $21 apiece), parking (incredibly cheap; $25 to park on the lots, but there’s not enough parking and they over-sell the spaces, so my dorm has overflowed its little parking lot and started taking over the semi-wooded area behind it; I’m sure that before it gets too cold there’s gonna be some boys out there with axes and chainsaws carving out more parking for the spring semester without the college’s permission), laundry machines.
The student health center, well, visits are free, but you have to pay for prescriptions and lab work. You don’t have to pay cash, though, they’ll put it on your tab and you’ll pay it with the rest of your tuition when you get the bill later.
Of course, tuition here is incredibly cheap, too. And you get what you pay for when it comes to the education here. :rolleyes:
Everything except room and board is free on our campus. Except of course, tuition is 18000/yr.
I live off-campus, and always have, so I don’t really know/care what people in rez are paying for, although I did figure it out once and concluded that living off campus, I was paying less than them.
Basically, my tuition and academic fees etc are about 2500 (CDN) a semester (less for the winter, because you only pay once for things like dental converage). Included in that are the regular tuition cost, health plan, dental plan (which you can opt-out of and get about 80$ back - I keep it since I don’t have dental converage through my family), certain fees for CSA, athletic centre, bus pass, and I think various other clubs and student organizations.
I would have to pay for my own meal card if I wanted, but I can make my own lunch and bring it to school, so we aren’t forced to pay for that. Parking is about 170$ a year, and the parking lots are pretty decent. In fact, almost all of the close-to-main-campus lots are for studetns, however they do fill up early in the AM. There is, however, plenty of parking available, but you have to walk a few minutes to get to wherever your classes are. It takes maybe 15 mins to get from one extreme end (east-west) of campus to the other, and there are lots on both sides. North-south is a shorter walk, but less parking available.
One good thing about the health plan is that its additive to whatever coverage you have through OHIP (or the RAMQ, in my case). So if one covers something the other doesn’t, you can still get it. My provincial medicare doesn’t cover birth control, while the school does, so I’m saving a good 16.00$ a month on that. And of course, whatever health coverage you have through jobs or family also gets added on.
Overall, I think its an ok deal, even though there are a lot of small things we are paying for that we never use.