USC Tuition and Fee Considerations
USC currently uses two levels of what in KS would be ATPs, which we call Terms and Sessions. In KSspeak, our Terms are KS Terms, and our Sessions are KS Sub-terms.
USC Terms contain some broad date elements and a few flags indicating how things work for everything
under that term. We have three Terms each year: yyyy1 – Spring of yyyy, yyyy2 – Summer of yyyy, and
yyyy3 – Fall of yyyy. yyyy is always the calendar year; therefore, the “normal” academic year is yyyy3 +
yyyy(+1)1 + yyyy(+1)2. Each USC Session exists under one USC Term.
The USC Session contains the detailed milestone dates (pre-registration, registration, class-begin date,
last day to drop without academic record, last day to add, last day to drop with a mark of ‘W’ on the
academic record) which we are used to in KS. The USC Session also contains the detailed Tuition and
Fee calculation information which is applicable to students registered for sections (activity offerings) in
that Session. This includes the per-unit tuition rate (if any) for undergraduate students and for graduate
students, the flat-fee tuition rate (if any) for undergraduate students and for graduate students, late
penalty fee amounts and milestones for them, any other form of semester/term based fee amount
often with full-time/part-time amounts and undergraduate and graduate flags associated with them.
Any time an amount is recorded, so is the transaction code (our FTCode) by which it is posted to the
student’s bursar account. Included here are also means of listing certain majors (programs) which are
exempted from certain fees.
A problem that we’d like to solve is that despite the fact that any given USC Term has about 400
different USC Sessions, there are really only about 40 – 60 (at the most) different Tuition and Fee
structures, but because we’ve made that part of the USC Session definition, that information must be
recorded in each USC Session, hopefully identically in each case. We’d like to reduce the effort related
to the maintenance of this information.
A Suggested Approach:
I’d recommend decoupling the Tuition and Fee calculation information from the ATP definition. Instead,
establish T&FCalc schemas which contain that information and associate the appropriate schema to the
activity offerings which belong to it. At USC, that association is already performed by the department
scheduling coordinators when they enter the session information. I’d recommend that the T&FCalc
schemas have term versioning so that the DSCs will always know what the schema is, and the rollover
can preserve that association, and by the Bursar’s office maintaining the schema details on a term-byterm basis, everything would work “flawlessly.”
Examples:
Schema #1 – Regular (Fall 2011 Term – 20113)
Flat-fee UG
Tuition
Per-unit UG
Tuition
Flat-fee G
Tuition
Per-unit G
Tuition
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student Aid
Fund Fee
Student
Health
Insurance
Orientation
Fee
Orientation
Fee
Health
Center Fee
T101
$21,081.00
Min: 12.0
Max: 18.0
T201
$1,420.00
T111
$21,081.00
Min: 15.0
Max: 18.0
T211
$14,20.00
T600
$100.00
08/20/2011
T600
$100.00
08/27/2011
T600
$100.00
09/03/2011
T505
$57.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T505
$32.50
Grad
Full-time
T525
$18.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T525
$12.50
Grad
Full-time
T503
$8.00
M226
$451.00
Min: 6.0
T506
$150.00
U-Grad
T515
$35.00
Grad
T504
$244.00
Min: 6.0
Exempt:
482, 1316
Exempt:
485
Schema #1 – Regular (Spring 2012 Term – 20121)
Flat-fee UG
Tuition
Per-unit UG
Tuition
Flat-fee G
Tuition
Per-unit G
Tuition
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student Aid
Fund Fee
Student
Health
Insurance
Orientation
Fee
Orientation
Fee
Health
Center Fee
T101
$21,081.00
Min: 12.0
Max: 18.0
T201
$1,420.00
T111
$21,081.00
Min: 15.0
Max: 18.0
T211
$14,20.00
T600
$100.00
01/07/2012
T600
$100.00
01/14/2012
T600
$100.00
01/21/2012
T505
$57.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T505
$32.50
Grad
Full-time
T525
$18.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T525
$12.50
Grad
Full-time
T503
$8.00
M226
$658.00
Min: 6.0
T506
$150.00
U-Grad
T515
$35.00
Grad
T404
$244.00
Min: 6.0
Exempt:
482, 1316
Exempt:
485
Schema #1 – Regular (Fall 2012 Term – 20123)
Flat-fee UG
Tuition
Per-unit UG
Tuition
Flat-fee G
Tuition
Per-unit G
Tuition
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Incremental
Late Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Programming
Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student
Services Fee
Student Aid
Fund Fee
Student
Health
Insurance
Orientation
Fee
Orientation
Fee
Health
Center Fee
T101
$21,861.00
Min: 12.0
Max: 18.0
T201
$1,473.00
T111
$21,861.00
Min: 15.0
Max: 18.0
T211
$1473.00
T600
$100.00
08/25/2012
T600
$100.00
09/01/2012
T600
$100.00
09/08/2012
T505
$57.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T505
$37.50
Grad
Full-time
T525
$20.50
U-Grad
Full-time
T525
$12.50
Grad
Full-time
T503
$8.00
M226
$516.00
Min: 6.0
T506
$150.00
U-Grad
T515
$35.00
Grad
T504
$253.00
Min: 6.0
Exempt:
482, 1316
Exempt:
485
During the rollover process, or the create from existing/copy process, the new activity offerings would
retain the schema from the original activity offering without any needed intervention from the
department scheduling coordinator unless they wanted to associate a particular activity offering with a
different schema. The T&FCalc process would know what KS Term that activity offering was part of
based on its Sub-term (if any) relationship to the KS Term, and thereby know how to calculate (we have
rules about what to do if the student registers for activity offerings in more than one USC Session, now
schema).
Because the Term-based fee amounts are likely to change from term-to-term, and especially from yearto-year, I would recommend that the major-based rules be maintained in the schema rather than
become part of the program offering definition. Maintaining it in the program offering definition would
require creating program offerings unnecessarily just for this purpose when for most of our programs,
we’d create an offering that lasts forever (or a good portion thereof) – for example, our undergraduate
English program hasn’t changed for at least ten years so we’d have a single offering effective from Fall
2001.