The State Board of Higher Education voted unanimously Friday to provide an accounting to students of how their “program resource fees” are spent. Students in certain majors, such as engineering, pay such fees.

Universities collect program resource fees in addition to tuition to help pay faculty, resource materials, equipment and specialized services. But students have long complained that the fees are mysteriously and arbitrarily assigned.

Program resource fees for Oregon State University engineering majors can be up to $443 per term. Students at OSU’s Honors College face a $250 fee each term. Business students pay $130 a term.

“Students don’t know what they are for … in most cases students don’t know about these fees, and then they get their tuition bills, and they are surprised,” said Courtney Sproule, communications director for the Oregon Student Association, the group that lobbied for the change.

“We need to give students the bottom-line sticker price,” said Di Saunders, communications director for the Oregon University System.

That would take some of the sting out of the fees for Ryan Mann, 21, a junior who is the director of the Associated Students of OSU’s state affairs task force.

“My freshman year, I was a business major … and I got my first bill to pay to Oregon State, and there was a lot of stuff on there I didn’t know about, including the program resource fee,” he said.

Mann now pays $40 a term for his political science major. “We kind of joke, wondering where that is going,” he said.

Mann called the greater access to information about the fees exciting. The changes will start in the 2008-09 school year at OSU, Saunders said, and will roll program resource fees into tuition so students will be clear about the cost of college.

Other Oregon public universities have until 2011 to adopt the changes.

Sproule said the new practice will make it easier for students to factor the program resource fees into their financial aid planning. Universities will not reduce the fees, only better explain them.

“Certain high-cost programs would have a different tuition rate than regular programs would have,” Saunders said.

By Kyle Odegard. He can be contacted at kyle.odegard@lee.net or 758-9523.