I'm trying to introduce tuition to my hood, but I'd like to have something to guide. I don't want to overpay or underpay, so I'd like to know how much do you pay:

- for Sim State
- for La Fiesta Tech
- for Académie Le Tour

I guess Sim State is the cheapest one and Académie Le Tour is the most expensive, but how much do you pay, and how do you pay it? Do you pay it all at once, every semester or what?

In my game, Sim State and La Fiesta Tech are both 20,000 overall, and Academie Le Tour is 50,000 overall. Really rich families pay the whole fee at once, while sims from families who can't afford it have their parents send a bit of money whenever they can, and they fill out the rest with scholarships, money from getting good grades, and money from working in the cafeteria. If they graduate though and haven't fully paid the amount by then, they have to pay interest on whatever is left and essentially pay college bills before they pay for anything else, including food or regular bills. Could get pretty ugly! That's why really poor families don't send their kids to college at all (unless the kid earned so many scholarships that they will barely have to pay anything factoring in good grades every year), and only the richest families send their kids to Academie Le Tour. I also play with only four two-day semesters, so the whole experience is much quicker.

I don't charge differently for different universities. My fee is based on type of housing.

Dorm is 5000 per semester, so 40k total. Dorm fee can be reduced by cleaning the dorm. Gets you a 500 discount per semester, for helping out. Requires you to clean the entire thing once per semester.
Private house is 10000 per semester, or if you share, 7500 per person

You have one sim year after you leave college to pay, after that you are charged interest. One sim year is four seasons, in my game. Since my Sims live longer than the regular age span, it works well for me.

40k for Sim State seems a bit too much for me. I'll probably follow Jojoa's model (or someone else's, if I find better ones). I like to send medium-class kids to college, so 40k for each college isn't possible. And paying as much for Sim State and Académie also seems strange.

What works depends so very much on your playstyle. Some people don't tend to get their Sims promotions, or use custom careers that give less, in which case 40k is pretty insane. But in my game it's a good way to prevent build up of funds. Doesn't mean it'll work for everyone

Where I come from university costs nothing, so the idea that one is more than another is strange to me. But hey, if that makes sense to you then you should do that way I just wanted to share the whole paying different based on housing option, and having things they can do to earn discounts.

In my neighborhoods education is free, but the sims have to pay for the actual academic degree: 20000 simoleons have to be payed before graduation or the student simply cannot graduate. They must drop out when the final exam is announced at the latest. Several smaller payments are allowed (but they really make no sense, because the fractional sum isn´t payed back if a student fails to raise the full sum.)

I make use of Christianlov´s fake college diploma for my adult education program. Sims enrolled in this program travel to a custom vacation destination and work through a list of individual goals there. In these cases the tuitition fee equals the cost of the "vacation".

Some neighborhoods place class restrictions on the students, so only nobles or students sponsored by a noble may proceed to year 3 and 4, no matter how rich. Same goes for the better universities. If you lack the proper connections you simply cannot go there.

Uni right now will be $10,000 simply because it's a new hood and most of my sims are poor. My play style is such that many of my sims do not make much. I use no 20K handout and halved wages. They will be paying back that $10,000 for some time. I only Mootilda's Uni now not the game ones.

Community college is $2000 if you board and I don't plan to change that. Done from home is half that.

I've never seen so many threads about UNI crop up at once.

I don't have University, but if I ever get it, I can categorically guarantee that my Sims will never have to pay tuition fees. I consider free education at all levels to be the mark of a civilised society. I benefitted from free university education myself in the 1980's. A fairly nominal tuition fee of about £450 per year was always automatically paid by a government grant, and, as a so-called "mature student" I also received a "maintenance grant" of over £2,000 per year. But that was at a time when my country was still a place I could be proud to belong too. Today's students, at least on the English side of the border face tuition fees of £9,000 a year for three years, and of course no maintenance grant, meaning that they graduate with crippling debts. If I was young today, I couldn't go to university. Basically I belong to a generation who took everything free that was going, and then, when it was our turn, refused to pay. Unlike me today, my Sims do live in a civilised society, so they won't have to pay for their education. In this matter I'm determined as The Player to get my way, even if Consort Capp, Patrizio Monty, Malcolm Landgraab et al disagree -- Veronaville belongs to all the Sims who live there -- not just to them.

Far from charging for tuition, I am minded to give each student a kaching every semester to meet their living costs. It's no more than I got myself.

I greatly enjoyed my time as a student myself, both academically and socially and feel a bit guilty about not having a university for my Knowledge Sims to go to. The main reason is that I normally play with aging off and I don't know how I could match that up with fixed length semesters of a few days. I managed to stretch my own time as a student to seven years, studying at three universities, so 24 days from starting to graduating with a PhD seems rather short to me. And I've a lot I can do with OFB (the last EP I bought) that I haven't done yet. But I'll guarantee that, if I do get a university, my Sims won't have to pay to go there. Sorry for the rant, but I don't see why my Sims should have to pay for what I got free myself.

Any other champions of free education for Sims out there?

Andrew, the game length of UNI is 24 days, a very long time. Plus that is time added, it doesn't take away from the other age groups. I think you would enjoy it if you could get UNI.

Real life me totally agrees with you Andrew. Education should not be based on ones economy. But I promise, my Sims love it.

Just now I'm playing Andreas Nilsson, and he's absolutely loving the addition of a mod allowing him to get a job while at university. He throws himself from one chore to another. His first day of work was working an 8-16 shift working as a mailroom technician. He got promoted, and the second he got back home he ran off to his lecture. When he got back from that, he autonomously started cleaning up the dorm. He's a fortune Sim, so all that making money and the prospects of getting discounts on his fees is making him all kinds of excited.

He's now three days into having a full time job on top of his studies, and so far so good. He still had plenty time (and desire) to get an A, give financial advice on the internet, and even squeeze in some flower-arranging (he's studying business management in the hopes of running his own flower shop later on). He's left for work topped on all motives, so he's not suffering in any way either.

He's working this hard because he decided to, not because I'm telling him.

Sims do in fact get a kaching every semester, if they maintain their grades, Andrew! If you get top grades, it's $1,200, and it goes down from there depending on grades. There's probably no reason sims with the extended teen and child years you're providing shouldn't make top grades every semester. I guarantee you'll love it when you're ready to play it.

I'm also all in favor of free or at least low-cost education for all (education and birth control - you fund those right down the line, and watch other public support systems become less necessary as a consequence!) and take full advantage of the vanilla game's mechanics. If I needed restrictions for story purposes, I'd be more likely to make the different colleges have academic requirements than financial ones. For instance, I might require that sims have certain grades (not hard to accomplish in most circumstances), but that they have certain ranges of skillpoints to qualify for different majors. Science courses might require that the student have completed science- and math-based college prep courses represented by a certain number of logic points; art and literature might require a minimum amount of creativity representing fine arts and language training; politics might require charisma (debate team!); drama might want charisma and body to represent being active in community theater.

If I had all the colleges in the game (Drama Acres only has SSU), I might divide them by specialty. LFT may be harder to get into for science courses, for example, while ALT might emphasize fine arts, while SSU is the good school for liberal arts. A C+ student who wanted to study bio might be able to get into ALT where LFT wouldn't touch him. This reflects the real-world specialization of certain campuses - it is harder to get into the veterinary medicine program at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University than it is to get into most medical programs designed to turn out doctors, for instance. You really don't want to study poetry there, though.

So you're all talking about tuition that you impose yourself on your Universit students, right? I've never been entirely clear on what the game charges, because my students have varing scholarships and usuall work in the cafeteria now and then. I play University almost unmodded. I build my own dorms, and I have a mod that's supposed to limit the number of professors but hasn't been very efficient at it, and Phaenoh's mod to connect majors better to careers, but I do nothing to change the length of the semester, the bizarre scheduling of finals, or the behavior of dormies, for example.

I'm with Andrew philosphically. I went to the University of California before Proposition 13, and the fees were almost negligible: I could pay all my fees from two months' summer work, and all I had to find was living money. By the time my kids came along, it was completely different.

Sim State = 20k
Fiesta Tech = 50k
Academie = 100k

I use Cyjon's Loan Jar (what a blessing that mod is) to add the debt + interest automatically. And then deduct the money the sim "borrowed" for "expenses" such as food, books, room & board, classes. So they're usually left with close to nothing of the money the loan jar borrowed. Then when they finish Uni, make sure to put the jar in their inventory (as far as I know there is no damage to the game if you forget the jar. Hell, you don't even have to pay back the loan. you could just delete the jar like nothing happened). When they move into their own home or back home or whathaveyou they start paying the loan off.

The only families that don't have to pay off the loan are those that can afford it. And since I have very expensive bills (yay Amura's mods!) it's almost impossible. Only the richest of my families can go to Uni without taking out a loan. Of which I have no rich families. So there you go.

Lol, my sims grand kids would still be paying of grand dads UNI education at 100K! I fully expect it will take my sims over half their lifetime to pay off the 10K I am imposing now, your sims must be rich.

I play small hoods so playing with multiple universities doesn't appeal to me. In Reefside I charged $1150 per semester if it was paid upfront ($9200) if however the student pays as they go along it goes up to $1250 per semester or $10,000 all up. If a sim fails a semester they're expected to pay for repeating the semester. They also have to pay for accommodation although this is subsidized. The accommodation ranges from $200 per semester (8 semesters of class plus the last semester) so it works out to be $1,800 for accommodation in an average dorm. I also give my sims the option of living in a fancy dorm or a very sparse dorm for a discount. In my new hood I may change this amount to a flat $2,000 per semester including accommodation upfront ($16,000) with an extra $1,000 for paying it throughout the degree. Sims have to pay at least a whole semester upfront at all times and this is non refundable if they fail/dropout. My sims only skill and study when they want to (or fear failing) so scholarships and grants are rare and sims think twice before sending their less studious kids to uni.

They're certainly not. xD Though some of them do earn a lot thanks to the default careers. It helps to have earned maxed careers and multiple people working in the household. Paying it off 250 or 500 simoleon at a time ain't so bad.

Lucy, the game doesn't charge you for university. It's just rules that people invent and apply using different mods to remove the money I send it via monique's computer to the minister of education, who the uses it to fund a cheap cafeteria for students, and an academy that gives scholarships to people by hiring them and teaching them skills.

I think I know what I'm going to do:

- at Sim State, everyone can study pretty much everything (at least a C), and you pay 300 simoleons/semester (I agree that education should be free). But if you want to study History, Philosophy or Political Science you'll need at least 6 points in Charisma
- at La Fiesta Tech, anyone with at least a C+ can enter, but for Mathematics, Physics, Biology or Psychology a Sim will need at least a B and 6 points in Logic. If you entered any of those majors, you don't pay; otherwise it's 300/semester like SSU;
- at Académie Le Tour, only Sims with at least B can enter. Art, Literature, Drama or Philosophy need an A- and 6 points in Creativity. Everyone needs to pay 1000/semester.
- at Unnamed University, only those who want to study Economics or Political Science enter. No restrictions in grade/points. 600/semester.

What do you think of this model?

My sims don't have much money, most of them. Of course the sims from the old rich families party it up and have lots to spend, but most of my teens are going with just whatever scholarships they earned. Even with longer lifespans, they don't have all that much, and of course some of them marry and/or have kids before/during university, which makes it that much more expensive. No20khandouts seems to solve the problem of overly wealthy sims pretty well, and the more expensive NPCs mod does the rest: a sim who can't earn more than $700 a day can't afford a nanny for their kids, so a stay-at-home parent is almost a necessity. That plus they only skill if they roll a want to or do it autonomously keeps most of them struggling. Fortune sims have the easiest time in their careers, but knowledge sims usually do okay. Popularity, Pleasure, Romance, and Family sims often only get promotions by chance cards or during the fall when they get the generic season-related skill wants. Bills and other necessities keep my college students poor. Oh, and first generation college students have it harder: sims without a degree are capped in their careers, so there's less family support.

Tech schools where I am are usually two year colleges, so LFT takes anyone who has a C or better--any high school grad. Their focus are traditional tech school sorts of careers: cooking, nursing, etc. SSU, being a typical state university, takes anyone with a grade of B or better, and offers all your general arts and sciences. To attend ALT, a student must be from a wealthy family or have at least eight scholarships, and graduate from private school. (This is not quite as bad as it sounds: I have the scholarships for silver badges mod, but, since sims don't skill unless they want to, only the most dedicated teens can be scholarship students at ALT.) ALT students study fields like law and politics. So not all sims who qualify for ALT want to go there.

In the real world, I'd like to see student loans be discharged by bankruptcy. Used to be, back before federal student loans that couldn't be discharged, a kid could work during the summer and go to college the rest of the year and graduate without debt. I figure the universities and colleges would get their fees and tuition under control pretty fast if they couldn't shove loans at students.

In real life, I think free education would be great! I think it's super important for so many reasons! I was only able to attend the college I did because of massive financial aid, and it's sad that education has to be expensive, especially when at this point a college education is necessary for so many fields. In fact, I'm now going to grad school because I need yet MORE education for my field of choice.

But as much as I wish it were a certain way in real life, in my sims game I've discovered that it's more fun to play when I make it challenging, and so that each family is a different experience. In my last big save, my families all started to get really rich after even just one generation. That wasn't so much fun when essentially every family I played could buy anything they wanted. Now that I've started a new megahood, with some premade families already being very rich and others starting out not so much, I make my sims' lives harder- no20khandouts, bigger bills, halved salaries, and college tuition. I'm also trying to let kids, teens, and YAs be good or bad students based on their wants (or in some cases their parents' wants). I think that it's interesting going from a super rich family that has enough money to send their kids to Academie Le Tour even if they're practically failing school (if the student has under a B grade, the family has to bribe the school an additional 20,000 to let the student go) to a family living in a tiny shack who has to work hard just to pay the bills. And fortunes can change quickly- what if the heir to a rich family loses their job, can no longer afford upkeep/bills on their massive house, and has to move out? What if someone in a struggling family gets lucky at work and wins 50,000 from a very lucrative chance card? It's interesting to see what happens, and how sims do in their specific situations.

The game does charge something though--is it only room rent at the dormitory?

Bills, if you're in a rental, just like if you're in a main neighborhood house. The dorm is, I think, based on the total value of the doom and how many sims it houses, and how many of them are playable.

I gave up on charging tuition. It was too much "paperwork" to keep track of. No20KHandouts keeps my Sims pretty poor, so I decided that education would be free if a given Sim qualifies to go. (And that's a big "if," given the rules I have in place for deciding who goes) Those who do go arrive only with whatever scholarship money they've earned and they keep whatever good-grade-grants they earn during their college time, less whatever they spend, of course. Whatever money they have when they leave college (Many students are forced to drop out, again because of various rules I've put in place), is what they have to start their post-college life with, although if they manage to graduate they also get a "good on ya!" bonus, the amount of which depends on their GPA at graduation.

I used to do all that plus make them take out loans for tuition, using Monique's computer's loan function, but I found that it was just too much, since the loans accrued interest and my pixels sometimes had a mortgage and/or a business loan on top of the tuition loan and since I have some pretty strong caps on how far a Sim can progress in certain careers without a college degree, the debt was too much and not remotely realistic. No one could get ahead, which subsequently meant that most if not all of my Sim's kids moved out on their own with not a penny to their name, because of no20KHandouts. So, I dropped the college tuition and things work much better for me. Even when I did tuition, each neighborhood would only ever have one Uni attached (and I tend to favor Mootilda's Brainania over any of the Maxis ones) so there were no "this one costs more/less than that one" issues.

As for free education in the real world...I'm ambivalent about it, honestly. While I philosophically believe that everyone ought to be entitled to a good education, on a more practical leve, if absolutely everyone gets the same education then it levels the playing field too much, so to speak. It used to be that a college degree was rather rare, mostly because colleges used to be a lot choosier about who they'd let in, but nowadays far more people get one because colleges have lowered their standards. More students = more money, after all. Which ultimately just makes it harder for college graduates to find jobs worthy of their degree because, by definition, there are fewer of those jobs to be had. So, you end up with kids (or their parents) accruing a ton of debt to get that degree but then not being able to find an education-level-appropriate job when they graduate. So, you have folks with high-level degrees working whatever job they can get, even if that means working at McDonalds. Such jobs often don't pay well enough to cover both living expenses and paying off those college loans. If even more people had higher-level degrees because getting them was suddenly free, then the problem would be even worse, at least in the sense of being able to find an appropriate job, even if the college-loan issue was no longer a factor.

I'm not sure what the solution is, personally, but it would require a massive overhaul of the system here in the US. As a Libertarian, I'm certainly not going to advocate the government taking over higher education, but that's really the only way that free higher education could possibly work, if the entire population is taxed so that the entire population pays for everyone to go to college, including the cost of paying the professors, maintaining the campuses, etc. And....Well, I can't say I'd really be in favor of that, personally.

I was planning on using the $10,000 mortage shrub, it doesn't charge interest. My shop owners who took out loans on Monique's computer often get hit with as much interest as the payment they just made the day before.

It's hard in sims too. Right now I have a free school but the Mayor is paying the two teachers out of his own pocket. I'm not organized to keep that separate, but he's only just managing to pay them.