Professional Fees
What are professional fees?
Professional fees are applied for courses in disciplines that have higher costs to teach (specific equipment, software, licenses, consumables, etc.). They replace previous class fees and allow students to better predict the overall cost of their education.
How much are professional fees?
They are $35 per credit for students enrolling in any upper-division engineering (ENGR), civil engineering (CE), electrical engineering (ECE), materials science and engineering (MSE), and mechanical engineering (ME) courses.
Why create these extra costs on top of tuition?
Quite simply: It is expensive to teach engineering. The equipment we use is costly. Many universities charge a higher tuition for engineering and other high-cost majors.
How do we use professional fees?
The Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering dedicates the professional fees on our upper-division courses directly into student learning.
Educational support
Engineering is a challenging discipline that depends on highly technical instruction. Professional fees have been used to hire peer educators and course support assistants to ensure students have access to tutoring sessions, one-on-one assistance, and quick turn-around on feedback from assignments. The fees also fund equipment maintenance and replenish consumable materials for student projects.
Engineering Innovation Studio
In planning with students, access to resources was strongly requested. In response, professional fees have been invested in enlarging the space of our student machine shop and increasing the capability and capacity of the facilities. To date, investments quadrupled the floor space of the shop and added additional equipment, collaboration space, and staffing.
Student support
In addition to classroom instruction, we believe students benefit from experiential learning activities. A portion of professional fees are used to supplement funds for student organizations, undergraduate travel awards, and other expenses that contribute to student learning.
Departmental program advancement
Our department recognizes that mechanical engineering is a broad field with innumerable career options. Professional fees aid us in providing exposure to speakers and activities in a variety of the disciplines mechanical engineers can pursue. This “value-added” commitment allows our students access to researchers, industry professionals, and professional development instruction that they can use to better prepare for a professional career after graduation.