When rising junior and first-generation student Debbie Matesun transferred to a four-year institution, she felt blindsided by unforeseen costs. She was required to live on campus, which was more expensive than off-campus housing. A single textbook could cost $200, so she postponed buying books for the first couple months of the semester, and even then, she had to choose which classes to buy materials for. At one point, she was working multiple jobs, something she couldn’t bring herself to tell her Nigerian single mother.
Matesun’s university, which she chose to keep anonymous, offered an estimate of non-tuition costs – like books, healthcare, room and board – but they “were double that in reality,” she said. “It’s just so disheartening.”
Now she’s a student advocacy fellow for uAspire, a non-profit focused on college affordability, where she talks about this issue with policymakers. The organization recently came out with a report titled, “Beyond the College Bill: The Hidden Hurdles of Indirect Expenses.”
The study drew on 16 student focus groups, nine interviews with senior financial aid administrators, 11 interviews with higher education professionals and data sets from the National Center for Education Statistics. Authors also analyzed more than 800 university websites to assess how schools convey non-tuition expenses to students, focusing on institutions in California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.
Among students surveyed, 51% paid more for indirect expenses than they expected, 53% changed their food shopping or eating habits and 42% were concerned they wouldn’t be able to stay enrolled as a result.
The report found that information about indirect expenses is often hard for students to find and confusingly worded on college websites. Out of 820 universities, 39% provided no estimates about non-tuition costs on their websites, while 23% gave itemized lists of costs with no explanations and 7% had missing or outdated estimates.
“Almost half really didn’t give students the information they needed,” said uAspire Chief Policy Advisor Laura Keane, a co-author of the report.
