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POLICY 329: COURSE FEES
SOURCE: NDSU President
1.Statement of General Policy
1.1 The North Dakota State Board of Higher Education (SBHE) authorizes institutions to charge and collect special course fees as may be necessary to facilitate the conduct of such identified courses. (SBHE 805.3) These are fees charged to a student in a special course or program to cover unique costs related to the course or program.
1.2 Fees should be kept to an absolute minimum, recognizing the ever increasing cost for students attending institutions. They must be for expenses not otherwise covered in operating budgets in the department. Fees may not be assessed to a) cover costs of duplicating course materials, i.e., handouts, syllabi, (however, other necessary printed or duplicated course materials may be sold through the NDSU Bookstore; or b) recover costs associated with instructional services such as test grading, preparing examinations, cleaning rooms or laboratories, or test materials, i.e., OPSCAN sheets
2. Types of Course Fees
2.1 Laboratory Fees - Fees may be collected to cover a special need within a laboratory course. Students must receive what they pay for. The fees are not transferable (for example, for other laboratories in the college), do not substitute for operating funds, and generally must be spent within the academic year they are collected.
2.2 Field Trip Fees - Fees may be assessed for costs involved with field trips and may include costs of entrance fees, lodging, food and the pro rata cost of travel.
2.3 Special Course Fees - Fees may be assessed to recover certain costs associated with courses that have off-campus elements to them and require additional travel by faculty to visit the sites and collect information on the sites or student activities at the sites.
3. Procedures to Establish Course Fees
3.1 Department Chairs and Deans, in consultation with the faculty, will identify courses appropriate to this policy. Criteria for the inclusion of a course fee are
1)Quality of educational experience for the student;
2) The inability to provide a quality educational experience without using an additional fee; and
3) High service-use courses when material costs exceed the department's capacity to pay for the materials, e.g., specimens for laboratory courses, excessive paper usage for computer science courses;
3.2 Completion of an APPLICATION FOR COURSE FEE form and submission for review and approval by the departmental chair, academic dean, and Vice President for Academic Affairs are required. This application must be approved two weeks prior to the submission of the term schedule. All fees must be published in the term schedule and the course/laboratory syllabus.
3.3 There will be an annual review of all course fees by the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs.
4. Course Fees Operational Policies
4.1 Fee billings to students and collections will be administered and accounted for by the Customer Account Services Office. After all refunds have been processed by the Customer Account Services Office, the remaining fees will be transferred to the academic department's designated local fund. Expenditures of fees, accumulated in these designated local funds, shall be documented in accordance with the university's expenditure policies.
4.2 Refunds must be in accordance with SBHE policy and shall be made to students, pro-rated, as part of the regular financial reconciliation process for registration fees.
4.3 Once established, changes in the course fee should reflect expected changes in cost, expected program changes, and historical deviation in actual costs. All changes require approval before implementation and will require re-submittal of the approval form. Fees for courses will remain until the dean of the college notifies the VPAA of a discontinuance of a specific course fee.
HISTORY: November 1997; Amended October 2000. October 2007.