Club dues for abroad students vary

Editor's note appended

Students who plan to study abroad might want to pay attention to the details of their club’s financial contract. Though many clubs exempt members from paying club dues during semesters off, there are some that charge absent members fees for club maintenance.

While individual eating clubs set their own policies, “From my experience, it has been the case that the clubs do not collect regular fees for the time students are abroad,” Nancy Kanach, associate dean of the college and director of the Study Abroad Program, said in an e-mail.

Members of Cap & Gown, Ivy and Quadrangle Clubs, as well as of Tiger Inn, are not charged anything during semesters they choose to study abroad, former TI treasurer Ashley Beyers ’08, Ivy president Kyle Johnston ’09, Quad treasurer Todd Dale ’09 and Cap club manager Dennis Normile confirmed.

TI’s policy “is simple: if you are not using the club or dining here, you do not pay for doing so,” Beyers wrote in an e-mail.

Neither TI nor Quad charges members a “maintenance fee” to hold their spots in the club, officers from both clubs said. Students who go abroad for one semester pay exactly half the total club costs for the year.

“I just pay for when I’m in Princeton, being an active member and eating there,” Alex Renaud ’09, a Cap member who is studying in Panama for the semester, said in an e-mail.

Costs in absentia

Not all clubs exempt members who study abroad for a semester from paying a semester’s worth of club costs.

When Tower Club members go abroad for a semester, they are charged half of the yearly food and social costs, and they also are required to pay a “club fee” for the entire year, club president Stephanie Burset ’09 said in an e-mail.

The club fee contributes to “the cost of running Tower as a facility,” Burset explained. “All members have access to its computer cluster, the TV room, the library, etc., so we all take part in using energy, electricity and everything else that it takes to keep Tower going throughout the year.”

Colonial Club members Philip Levitz ’08 and Alex Fuller ’08 said that they were charged a small fee while studying abroad.

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Levitz, who studied at Oxford last fall, said in an e-mail that he paid half the annual cost for dues, as well as “a small annual membership fee in full for the whole year,” which was “only about $100.”

Fuller said in an e-mail that he paid the “members’ fee” of “about $600” when he spent his junior year participating in the Oxford Exchange in Engineering. “I was annoyed at this expense and still don’t see why I was required to pay it, although it wasn’t enough to make me quit Colonial,” he said.

Charter Club members who go abroad for one semester are guaranteed their spot and pay “a prorated membership fee that reflects that they will only be here for half of the year, in most cases,” club president Michael Coolbaugh ’09 said in an e-mail.

Steve Moskow, Charter manager, said that, though students only pay half of food and social costs, they are charged 70 percent of the year’s club maintenance fee for “running the clubhouse.”

Abigail Smith ’09, a Cottage Club member who is studying in Santiago, Chile, this semester, said in an e-mail that she did not have to pay dining or social fees for the semester.

When she paid her food bill for last semester at the beginning of the year, however, an additional $450 was included. Smith described this cost as “either club maintenance or something like a basic membership fee,” which, she said, included fall and spring semester.

Cottage officers did not respond to requests for comment.

Unintentional caveats

Terrace divides costs unequally between fall and spring semesters, giving members a financial incentive to study abroad in the fall. Members are billed 55 percent of club fees during the fall semester and 45 percent during the spring semester, club manager Christopher Nord said in an e-mail.

Though the payment schedule applies to all students, “It just happens to affect the study abroad students in a different way depending on their choice of semester to do it,” Terrace treasurer Adi Desai ’09 said in an e-mail.

Terrace compensates for the inequality by giving members who study abroad in the spring 5 percent credit toward the following year’s dues if they rejoin the club in the fall, Nord said. If students choose not to rejoin the club, they lose the credit.

Members of Terrace also do not have to pay a deposit for holding their spots while abroad, Nord said.

Members of Cloister Inn who study abroad are not guaranteed a spot when they return, club president John LaMonaca ’09 said in an e-mail, though Cloister does not charge fees for members’ time spent abroad.

This is usually not a problem for Cloister members who go abroad.

“We generally hover around a full slate of members, and when one or two go abroad or take a semester off, we might get a few back from the previous year, so we generally have the flexibility to accommodate members who do this,” LaMonaca explained.

Deciding on a club

Ashley Johnson ’08, who went to China during the fall semester of her junior year, did not consider finances when studying abroad before joining a club, because “I didn’t know I’d be going abroad at that time” and “because I was joining Terrace, the cheapest club on the Street, so I figured any fee wouldn’t be that big.”

But, she did not think paying club expenses while studying abroad was “fair to those students,” she added.

“[Students studying abroad] are not using their services, and, let’s be honest, such a small number of students study abroad during the academic year that I can’t imagine their absence would have that great of an effect on the financial situation of an eating club,” Johnson said.

Mark Smith ’09, who is studying in Panama this semester, said in an e-mail that he knew when he joined Tower that he would have to pay “a significant fee for maintaining the club while I’m abroad.”

The fee, however, “didn’t affect my choice to join Tower, because I think it’s a great club where I knew I would have a lot of fun,” Smith explained, “but it was a bit disappointing to hear that I would be paying much more than 1/2 of the cost of the club for a 1/2 year on campus.”

He noted that he thought Tower “is exceptional though in that they do provide a partial (significant) refund for members that stay in good standing until graduation.”

Renaud said that he “wasn’t exactly sure of the plan about studying abroad and paying for eating clubs when I decided to go abroad,” but that he “assumed it would work out.”

“It was a little difficult to get through to inform the accountants I’d be gone and not in Cap in the spring,” Renaud said, “but in the end everyone’s reasonable about it and it works out.”

The number of members currently studying abroad varies among clubs, from three members each in TI and Ivy to 10 members in Tower.

Editor's note:

The original headline for this article implied that Tower's fees for students studying abroad were highest among the clubs. Such a comparison is inaccurate because many clubs did not provide the amount of the fees that these students are charged.