Dues Included in Tuition/Fees?
 

Hi all,

I am new to these forums but I heard that some schools allow the fraternities/sororities to their tuition and fees. Does anyones college in here allow them to do this? My Greek Letter advisor want to know what other colleges do this so he can try to have mine do it too.

I have never... ever heard of fraternity/sorority fees being included in tuiton & fees for a school.

I haven't heard of this either. Joining a fraternity or sorority is not automatically included with enrolling in a school, so why should it be included in tuition/fees?

I've heard of dues being paid out of scholarships/loans. But that's mainly where the money is to cover any school related (extracuricular included) costs. Honestly I think with the advent of so many companies that handle the dues/finance side of things that the schools would be interested in getting a cut of the pie instead.

This is done at Washington and Lee, at least for sororities.I don't think it's done for fraternities, but I could be wrong. It would be an option for fraternities if they wanted to do it but for a variety of reasons I don't think they wanted to. It's possible that some of them did it and not others though.

So you get your semester bill and your sorority dues, parlor fees, sorority house fees, sorority meal fees, etc., all appear on your tuition bill as line items to be paid alongside tuition fees.

To do this our treasurer would have to submit the fees to the school every term.

Of course, there would be extra expenses like t-shirt fees, fees for formals and other events, etc., that we would have to pay to the treasurer directly.

^^ Have I mentioned lately that I really, really love Washington & Lee?

Yes. Basically it took a lot of the pressure off us to collect fees by hiring a collections agency. The school would do it for us essentially.

ETA: The one problem that arose is that people still had to pay national dues when they were abroad. Due to the way W&L runs its billing, it couldn't/wouldn't charge sorority fees in terms you were abroad. Actually I think that was just based on their philosophy that you shouldn't pay if you're studying abroad. But Pi Phi requires that you pay national dues even if you go abroad (we excused local fees). So we'd have to get checks for people for national dues before they left to go abroad which could sometimes be a pain because people didn't necessarily expect it.

I know that at my university, if you have any left-over payments on your student account, it will block you from certain services (registration, checking out library books, etc). If someone neglects to pay her bill at W+L, will it cause the same thing to happen?

Yes.

^^^ Wow. I guess that's not too bad of a system. It seems like it'd ensure dues were paid.

This may seem like a weird question; but, what happens when a parent, who is paying for the student's education expenses, refuses to pay for the Greek portion of the invoice? I'm thinking of instances where the student joined a GLO against his parents' wishes.

I guess maybe mom and dad would give their son or daughter the tuition part of the bill and tell the student that it's up to them to forward that money along with the GLO part to the university. Have you ever heard of a circumstance like that?

....Kelly :)

What kind of % does the school take to cover their costs?

Yes, I have. My dad actually threatened not to pay for sorority dues at first. I think I may have paid him back for my first semester in Pi Phi. But after my parents met my sisters and visited the house, they loved it so much that they had no more objections. (I lived there my sophomore year and my dad was soooo happy the house had AC and elevators on move-in day, unlike the W&L dorms). I knew of other people who paid their parents back for their sorority dues.

W&L is sort of old school compared to other schools in that it just does paper billing. Texas (where I'm in grad school) has paper and electronic billing and you can authorize multiple payers. So it would be even easier in a case like that, although I'm almost positive Texas doesn't charge Greek fees for the orgs.

None that I know of. I don't know what costs would be incurred by the school exactly. Do you mean like ink to print the extra lines? Or like any charges that would be made if people paid with credit card?

Honestly I don't think that W&L took any percent out. I mean they cut us a check for the full amount that we were owed. It was just a service they provided to the sororities. In fact they may have actually required us to do it, I'm not sure. This sort of concern might be one reason why schools that are larger than W&L and have way more administrative concerns and costs don't do this.