GRAND FORKS (AP) - Students who pay tuition at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State with a credit card will be assessed credit card processing fees starting next week.

The fees had been covered by the schools, but officials said they were adding up and it was hard to budget for the costs.

UND paid about $800,000 in card processing fees during the last school year, about $660,000 of which came from payments on student accounts, Associate Vice President for Finance Peggy Lucke said in a letter.

This year, Lucke said, the school is turning its credit card processing over to TouchNet PayPath, a private vendor. TouchNet will cover the credit card company's fees and recoup its costs, along with some profit, by charging students a 2.75 percent fee on top of tuition costs. It works out to about $165 on a $6,000 undergraduate tuition bill.

Campus administrators say the credit card costs should be covered by the students using the cards. When the university pays the fees, Lucke said, the cost is really being spread among all tuition-paying students and taxpayers through the state's general fund appropriation to the university.

Some UND students say turning the fee over to students is a backhanded way of raising revenue. They also are upset that the new vendor does not accept Visa, among the most common credit cards.

UND junior Andrew Lutz, in an Aug. 1 letter to the Legislature's interim Higher Education Committee, called the fee "nothing more than another chance for (UND) to pass on (its) costs of doing business to the students and parents who are keeping the institution alive and thriving."

The changeover is in conjunction with a new payment system for the state's 11 colleges and universities. It will allow students and their parents to pay tuition online, using either a credit card or an e-check. Lucke said the e-check option is a no-fee alternative to paying by credit card.

The cost of credit card fees has been increasing each year, Lucke said, and it's difficult for the university to budget for those costs because administrators do not know in advance how many students will pay with credit cards.

Lutz said many students who pay tuition with credit cards don't have enough cash on hand to cover tuition. For those students, he said, e-checks are not an option, and being forced to pay the credit card fee makes things worse.

Lucke said students who cannot afford to pay tuition should explore other options with the school's financial aid office, such as paying tuition in monthly installments.

UND Student Body President Jay Fisher is not critical of the fee shift. He said students already were bearing the cost of the fees when the university was paying them off with tuition revenue.

"It was a hidden cost," Fisher said. "Whenever you actually see a hidden cost, it hurts a little bit."

Lucke said other universities also have shifted credit card fees to students, including the University of Minnesota, the University of South Dakota and the University of Wisconsin. UND and NDSU are the only North Dakota University System schools shifting those fees.