Starting this year, Power 5 conference schools will be covering not just their athletes’ tuition with their scholarships, but the full cost of attendance. Essentially, it allows a school to pay for their athletes’ “out of pocket” fees, defined loosely as anything a college student might need outside of tuition, books, room and board, and other student fees.

This policy has been contentious. There are no caps on cost of attendance as yet, so notable coaches like Nick Saban and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney fear that schools will start to leverage it when recruiting. Indeed, there are large discrepancies in cost of attendance even within SEC schools. Tennessee offers the highest amount at $5,666 per year. If you go to Texas A&M, you’ll receive over $2,000 less.

In an effort to clarify exactly how schools arrive at their cost of attendance number, the Associated Press released a Q&A with experts on the subject. Here are some of the biggest takeaways:

  • The financial aid office at each collegiate institution is the department which calculates cost of attendance.
  • The primary purpose of providing cost of attendance is for prospective students to have a realistic expectation of what they will need to spend in order to go to a particular college.
  • Cost of attendance, also known as “indirect costs,” can include travel, laundry, clothes, entertainment, food, and other miscellaneous personal costs.
  • Those miscellaneous costs are calculated by looking at information gathered from College Board, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, student surveys, as well as costs from local and national businesses.
  • The SEC requires schools to report exactly how miscellaneous costs are determined.
  • Cost of attendance can vary from student to student within one university. For example, in-state and out-of-state students may have different costs of attendance. Undergraduate and graduate students also can have different costs of attendance. If an individual student feels that his/her cost of attendance should be increased, that student is also allowed to file a petition.
  • The SEC requires schools to report when an individual student’s cost of attendance varies from the school norm.
  • Cost of attendance can change from school year to school year.
  • After the financial aid department calculates cost of attendance, those results must then be approved by higher levels of administration. The hope is that this process will not only catch mistakes, but also prevent schools from unduly inflating their cost of attendance numbers.