‘College fees’ will affect some YSU students

By Harold Gwin

The fee change will allow greater latitude on how the university can spend the money cllected.

YOUNGSTOWN — Certain upperclassmen at Youngstown State University will see some new fees imposed on them for the fall 2010 term.

Neal McNally, YSU director of budget planning and resource analysis, recently outlined the creation of “college fees” that will affect only juniors and seniors enrolled in the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

The university’s Board of Trustees has approved the plan.

College fees differ from course fees in that the college can spend them anywhere within its scope of operations. A course fee can be spent by the school only for material for that specific course.

Ikram Khawaja, provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the change will enable the university to reduce existing fees attached to specific courses in both the liberal arts and social sciences and technology and engineering colleges.

The arts and sciences students could actually end up spending less under the change because the college-fee total will be lower than the course-fee totals in that college. Science and technology students will be paying more overall, he said.

The science and technology college is unique in terms of some of the expensive equipment required to run courses, and fees help meet those costs, he said.

This isn’t the first college fee YSU has put into place.

The trustees in June 2009 approved a $6.50-per-credit-hour fee on juniors and seniors enrolled in the Bitonte College of Health and Human Services that went into effect this school year to defray the cost of buying instructional equipment for the health-care programs in which they are enrolled.

Khawaja announced at the time that college fees were being considered for other colleges within the university.

The science and technology college fee will be $17 per credit hour up to a maximum of $204 per semester.

For arts and social sciences, the rate will be $5 per credit hour up to a maximum of $60 per semester.

The resolution approved by the trustees shows that certain liberal arts and social science course fees primarily affecting underclassmen will decline in the English department. For example, the course fee for English 1539 and English 1540 will drop from $50 to $20.

The new college fee for the library arts and social sciences college will generate about $73,000 annually. Lowering some existing course fees will reduce revenue by about $158,000 from the current $344,000 collected annually, said Dean Shearle Furnish.

That’s not a problem, according to Khawaja, noting that the course fees now collected in that college are not totally spent. There is a balance in that course-fee account, he said.

Switching to a college fee will allow the money collected to be spent anywhere in the college, not just for a specific course, Furnish said.

The new science and technology college fee will generate an estimated $400,000 annually, and some course fees in that college, primarily for first-year basic math, will be reduced by a total of $75,000, said Dean Martin Abraham.

Course fees now generate about $1 million a year in that college. This change will increase revenue by about $325,000 that can be used anywhere within the college, Abraham said.

gwin@vindy.com