Since the time that Roach’s son went to Dayton, for instance—he graduated in 2012, to be followed by two younger siblings—the school has stopped charging separate fees and rolled them into tuition, which it guarantees it won’t increase for the four years an accepted applicant remains enrolled.

The university was surprised to find that graduating students, in a survey, said they were “feeling nickel-and-dimed,” said Jason Reinoehl, Dayton’s vice president for strategic enrollment management. “Frankly they were ticked off, and they were saying this on the way out of college, which should have been a celebratory time.”

That’s because those graduates had been charged $2,100 annually in fees, on average, in five different bills per year, or at least 20 times per student over the course of their four years in college. Those fees included everything from counseling fees to lab fees to art-studio fees to access to the recreation complex to a “professional-development fee” in the school of business that turned out to pay for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.

“This was why students were annoyed, and we needed to fix it,” Reinoehl said.

The fees weren’t necessarily lowered, but since 2013 they have been included in the tuition charge ($26,590 this year), meaning more of them can be covered by financial aid and all are paid up front. This also encourages the university to hold the line on annual increases, which can no longer be partly hidden in fees. “There are no surprises here,” pronounces a message splashed across the binder in which applicants receive information about how much the university will cost them to attend.

The first students who were eligible for the program will graduate this spring, and the university says they have already had to borrow at least 15 percent less toward their degrees. Dropout rates have also fallen. So has the proportion of admitted applicants who fail to show up for their freshman year in September after getting their first bill.

Fees still add up to plenty of surprises for students and their families on other campuses, however. One reason is that they’re hard to track. There are few sources of information on how much fees actually cost, on average.

“Tuition gets all of the media attention while fees are hidden to students and also to public knowledge and oversight,” said Jennifer Delaney, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who specializes in higher-education finance.

Those that are reported tend to be mandatory fees, not the growing number of so-called supplemental fees charged by individual courses or departments, such as lab fees and that professional-development fee at the University of Dayton business school.

One new study calculates that student fees at four-year public universities averaged $1,719 in the 2012-2013 school year, the most recent for which the figure is available, adding another 27 percent to student charges on top of the typical cost of tuition.