CBBS Fees

What is the CBBS fee?

The CBBS fee is an additional payment to fund significant enhancements that directly benefit students. Please click the links on the left sidebar to obtain more information on college-wide and department-specific enhancements made possible by these fees.

How much is the CBBS fee (effective Fall 2008)?

  • A CBBS Major Fee of $1,000 per semester is assessed for all full-time CBBS majors who are juniors or seniors.
  • A CBBS Course Fee of $100 per credit hour is assessed for all other students for each credit hour of CBBS 300 and 400 level courses in which they are enrolled. This applies for CBBS majors who are freshmen or sophomores, non-CBBS majors, and part-time CBBS majors. The Coure Fee is assessed for a maximum of 10 credit hours per semester.
  • The total CBBS Fee (i.e., Major Fee plus Course Fee) paid by a CBBS major during their entire degree program is capped at the Course Fee equivalent of 40 credit hours. Please read Dean Lilly's Letter to CBBS majors for more details on this new assessment policy that is designed to ensure that no student is assessed the CBBS Major Fee for more than four semesters.

Why do we charge the CBBS major fee for full-time junior and senior CBBS majors?

CBBS is Clemson's largest and among its best colleges. Our degree programs are extremely popular and we restrict entry into our majors to only the best students. We want our students to not only have a Top-20 experience during their stay at Clemson, but to also benefit from this experience throughout their career success and lifetime earnings. Towards this end, we now provide a series of program enhancements specifically targeted for CBBS juniors and seniors, and designed to increase their success in highly competitive job markets. These enhancements include hiring additional faculty so that we can provide more sections of upper level CBBS courses, while still keeping section sizes small. This ensures that the high quality of these courses is maintained. The ability to offer more sections of upper level CBBS courses also allows us to guarantee that CBBS majors can get into these courses in the semester they need them, thus facilitating a timely graduation.

In addition, we offer several leadership and professional development opportunities such as interdisciplinary undergraduate research groups (creative inquiry), distinguished visiting professors, "I LEAD!" and "Horizons" programs, etc., that can directly help our students. We urge you to click the links on the left sidebar to obtain more information on college-wide and department-specific enhancements made possible by these fees.

These changes are already beginning to show results. For the past two years, Business Week magazine has ranked our undergraduate business programs in the Top 25 of national public schools, based on several success indicators including average class sizes, faculty to student ratios, starting salaries, and employer opinions. Student and employer feedback on our leadership and professional development initiatives has been very favorable, and we are constantly looking to identify additional ways to improve our college programs and the career success of our students.

Why do we charge the CBBS course fee for all other students who are enrolled in 300 and 400 level CBBS courses?

The primary benefit to non-majors is that these fees allow us to create more sections of our popular upper level courses, so that we can make seats available to students outside of our majors while still keeping section sizes small, thus ensuring that the high quality of these courses is maintained. In addition, these fees fund a number of program enhancements that benefit both majors and non-majors, including additional interdisciplinary undergraduate research groups (creative inquiry), distinguished visiting professors, and programs such as "Leaders in the Classroom".

We urge you to click the links on the left sidebar to obtain more information on college-wide and department-specific enhancements made possible by these fees.

Our CBBS classes are in very high demand, yet distribution of tuition dollars cannot be rapidly shifted from one program to another based on yearly fluctuations in enrollment. Some programs outside of CBBS have eliminated their programs for non-majors as a way to deal with capacity problems. We too had to decide whether to eliminate our offerings to non-majors, or to charge a course fee that gave non-majors a chance to enroll in our high quality upper level classes. We chose to go with the option of continuing to make seats available to non-majors.