Charging Student fees is more costly

Additional convenience fees add up for students paying with credit cards

By Caroline Cournoyer, staff writer
Posted on September 6, 2007

If best things in life really were free, no one would be paying for a college education.

Thanks to the invention of electronic transactions more and more students are paying for school with credit cards.  While this is easier, it is also more expensive.

To solve its financial crisis, the university decided to transfer the fee to the people using the service rather than struggle to pay it themselves, Combs said. Thus there is an additional 2.75 percent convenience fee for people paying their tuition online with a credit card.

“The credit card company charges a merchant’s fee,” Linda Combs, director of the university business office, said.  “It’s a percentage of the dollar amount, and back about five years ago it was almost over $600,000 a year.”

Combs said that at the time there was a budget crisis and they were unable to cover the merchant’s fee. 

JMU does not make any profit whatsoever from this convenience charge. It goes straight to the credit card companies, said Combs.

UBO makes students and parents aware of the convenience charge before they finalize their transaction.:

“It is a separate line item they have to actually approve before they hit that pay button,” Combs said.

While it is more expensive, the option of online credit card payment can be beneficial.

“We offer credit cards because for some people that may be the only payment option,” Combs said.  “We didn’t want to take that away.”

For some students, however, the cost of paying online does not outweigh the benefits.

“It’s not monetarily worth it,” sophomore Jocelyn Smith said.

Sophomore Emily Brown seemed to agree.

“You can just mail in a check,” she said.

These might be reasons why the amount of credit card payments have in fact decreased, according to the UBO.  Instead many are opting to pay using an electronic check system.

“We came up with electronic check payments that’s free, so we do offer customers two means of online payments,” Combs said. “They can still mail us a check.”

Because of its lack of a convenience fee, electronic check payments increased approximately 1 percent since fall 2006 while the number of online credit card transactions decreased approximately 2 percent, according to Combs.

“We are constantly looking at ways to improve customer service and convenience and certainly technology has helped us in the last couple years,” Combs said.  “We still take money the old fashioned way so I think we provide everyone a method of payment that is acceptable.”