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If that's for two semesters of school, that's not much more than what my SO ends up paying for engineering here (over 3 quarters versus semesters). While your son isn't taking many engineering classes yet, he will be eventually, and they have to spread out the costs of the lab/shop equipment and whatnot over all of the students. Here, being an engineering student comes with "free" perks--you get to print all you want at the computer labs, the engineers have their own computer labs, etc--of course they pay through all of these things via a fee only assessed to ENGR students. The College of Engineering here assesses a fee, which increases upon admission to pro school, then each school assesses another fee. Additionally, some classes assess a fee to cover the cost of labs.
And yeah, the textbook thing pisses me off too. The cost of attendance estimate for textbooks for a first-year engineering student at my university is $776/term. Pretty crazy. That's a cash grab by book publishers, not universities, though. Plenty of the profs I know are getting frustrated about it too.
And student fees go to pay for all of the things associated with the university experience--all of the student resource centers on campus (cultural, study skills, etc), the rec center, the library, computer labs, athletics, etc., all get a piece of the fee pie.
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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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