Kansas State won’t refund tuition if all classes return to distance education partway through the semester “since students are able to make progress towards their degrees with those courses,” Provost Charles Taber said.
Currently, K-State plans on holding in-person, hybrid and online classes beginning Aug. 17.
Tuition and fees will remain at the same rate as the 2019-2020 school year. The campus privilege fee will be capped at six credit hours of face-to-face or hybrid classes.
“The guidance is that they’ll pay the privilege fee only on the credit hours that they’re taking either fully face-to-face or hybrid,” Taber said.
If a student takes three credits in-person, but nine online, the student would only pay for half the privilege fee, Taber used as an example.
Online tuition and fees remains constant this fall as well: The university will use the same $70 per credit hour fee as this summer.
“This is much simpler.” Taber said. “It’s also a significantly lower amount, quite a bit lower than than what existed before where …. there was a combination of a Global Campus fee and a college-level online fee, and the total of that was in most cases more than double that $70. So this lowers the cost for students. It also makes it so much simpler for people to understand.”
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While Taber said some students may feel they are missing out on quality education on campus, online classes can provide many benefits to students
“There is this broad myth that online education does not provide educational opportunities that are equivalent to or that are as good as face-to-face,” Taber said. “There’s actually been a lot of research on this showing that online education in many cases is more effective than face-to-face.”
Taber said classes such as labs and studios aren’t as efficient online. Students require hands-on experiences in those classes which the university will try to accommodate.
“There are certain types of classes where it is harder to get the experience and we’re doing everything we can to offer those in a face-to-face or hybrid mode,” Taber said. “So those kinds of things are difficult to replace with online, and so we are doing everything we can to make sure that those are available in face to face or hybrid format.”
Professors and instructors can change the mode of instruction for classes in KSIS until Aug. 3 to accommodate campus guidelines for COVID-19 prevention.
“We’re really just trying to make it as easy as possible for students to continue their progress towards their degrees,” Taber said. “We understand what kind of hardship students are having both financially and in terms of the anxiety that comes with this crisis. We really are trying to minimize the difficulty that students would have in making progress towards their degree with these decisions.”
