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Originally posted by FAUNikki
Im confused, but maybe someone can explain this to me... When you pay tuition, do you not pay per credit? I mean like at my school it is about $100 per credit, if you take 9 its 900 and if you take 18 it is 1800...?
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FAUNikki, welcome to the mindwarping world of college costs! Your system, a set dollar amount per credit, is probably the most usual. But some schools or university systems -- and not just in Pennsylvania -- have gone to a different way of pricing. They may charge, say $100 per credit up to a maximum of, say $1500 a semester -- then there is NO addiional charge for taking more credits in that semester. One of the ideas behind this is to encourage students to take enough courses to graduate in a reasonable amount of time without going deeper and deeper into debt.
There are variations on this concept, but the goal is usually to "reward" students for really making progress to their degrees. And of course there's the school image factor: a higher percentage of students graduating "on time" makes the school look better in some of the national rankings (like U.S. News and World Report's, where they look at graduation in SIX years or less.)