It would be super helpful in our context to have a way of collecting a registration fee as part of the registration process.
Perhaps it could be connected to the term enrollment agreement? Maybe it's a pay wall that pops up when the student clicks "save" on their registration? Regardless of how it works on the back end, we have a non-refundable registration fee that currently gets invoiced to students along with their tuition. Unlike tuition, though, we never credit back the registration fee when a student withdraws or drops classes from their registration. This means we have a long list of old overdue student balances for the exact amount of our registration fee. Students complain that they shouldn't owe the fee if they didn't go through with taking a class (we have our policy clearly stated in three or four places that a student has to sign that they've read and agree to being invoiced this non-refundable fee, but it's still not clicking with them). If we collected the fee at the time of registration, we believe that paying the fee (and not getting it refunded) would make a lot more intuitive sense to our students.
What we really need is a way to collect our registration fee at the time of registration. This fee helps us cover the cost of processing the registration requests, student advising, planning classroom space (often renting space from other organizations), as well as paying for student accounts on a few different platforms. These costs are usually not negated when a student withdraws or drops a class, so we need to collect this fee on the front end as soon as the student submits their registration. It's really the same sort of thing as the application fee: it's a fee that covers the cost of administrative functions that will occur regardless of the outcome of the event taking place. The application fee needs to be collected to cover some of the cost of considering the application regardless of whether that application is successful or not. We need the registration fee to be collected at the time of registration regardless of whether the student changes their mind about taking a class. Invoicing them for the fee just isn't cutting it for us.
Help us Populi Kenobi! You're our only hope!
