Roughly 60 % of four - year public research universities had so - called
differential tuition policies — essentially they charge students different prices depending on their subject or year of study — during the 2015 to 2016 school year, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Antonio.
Other
policies were noted as deterring students from enrolling in some STEM programs, such as
differential pricing, where undergraduates are charged more
tuition for upper - versus lower - division coursework.