How come students give money to earn one college credit?

VOA report------Brandeis University near Boston, Massachusetts, offers a summer internship class. Students pay for one college credit. They must write an essay or keep a journal of their internship.

How come students give money to earn one college credit?
Thanks.

Each class at an American university is assigned a certain number of credit points. They are often called credit hours, even though they’re not hours. Typical classes carry three or four credits.

At most colleges you are not a full-time student unless you are taking 12 credits (which means three or four classes). Most colleges will not let you take more than 16 credits of classes without special permission. (At my school, 16 credits was the minimum for a full-time student, and most students took between 21 and 24 credits every semester.)

After a student has completed about 96 or 100 credit hours of classes, he is usually ready to graduate.

This use of the word credit has nothing to do with lending or borrowing money.

so what meaning of “pay for”?

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Pay for means pay money, Flora. Students must pay a tuition fee in order to receive one college credit (which term Jamie has explained) for matriculating in the summer internship class.
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Yes, and the classes at American colleges are usually priced by the number of credits they have.

At one community college near me, a class costs $68 per credit hour, so an ordinary 3-credit class costs $204.

At the college I graduated from, the tuition is $783 per credit hour, so a 3-credit class costs $2,349.

These are only the basic rates, though. At most colleges charge less per credit hour if the student is signed up for more than one class.