[owlglass]

As far as I understand, universities' reasoning for differential tuition varies from demand for a particular major, projected earning potential, and the cost of providing the major itself (for example, a civil engineering student requires all the material and facilities for their labs and field courses).

In Canada, this differential pricing between engineering and other majors is applied to all engineering disciplines, which is why software ends up with a higher cost than computer science, despite there being very few tangible differences in the curricula.

In my opinion, a model like that of your school's is much more reasonable, given that many of the core classes are the same.