BEIJING — Chinese students peer through the fences outside the exclusive American Olympic training center on a university campus here, hoping for a glimpse of Kobe Bryant or another basketball star, but behind the scenes there is grumbling and some intrigue over how the Americans ended up here and how much they paid for the privilege.

Beginning in late July, the Americans took over large swaths of Beijing Normal University, also known as Beishida, to give American Olympians extra opportunities to fine-tune their performance before and between Olympic competitions.

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“We have access to the gymnasiums, to tracks, to what Americans would call a field house, ball fields, a pool, and a weight room,” the chief spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee, Darryl Seibel, said. “There’s also housing for the coaching staff of the High Performance Center, personal coaches, and support personnel.”

The presence of the Americans has been a thrill for many students, particularly fans of the so-called Dream Team. “I like Kobe Bryant. Everyone in my school likes him,” an art student from Beijing, Xiu Lixing, 20, said.

However, at a school cafeteria where students were cheering yesterday while watching television coverage of China’s gymnastics team, it was evident that the arrangement with the Americans has also spawned complaints.

“I’m pretty excited about their coming, but in terms of impact, the construction sites have been pretty annoying to the whole school,” a law student from Xi’an, Li Cheng, 21, said. He said the university had paid students who live closest to the areas renovated for the Americans between 300 and 400 renminbi, or about $40 to $59, for the “annoyance” of construction work.

Since the Americans arrived, most of the campus has been closed to outsiders. Students and faculty members are required to scan identification cards to enter. There is new, temporary fencing dividing much of the campus. Security checkpoints with metal detectors and X-ray machines guard the gyms, cafeterias, and housing being used by the Americans. Those facilities are closed to everyone but the Americans and authorized visitors.

“The basketball courts we can’t use,” Mr. Xiu said. “Students at Beishida have to go outside to play football or basketball.”

“People are excited to have the team here, but they’re not as excited about things being closed,” a Los Angeles resident studying Chinese at the school, Alex Tan, said.

Money is at the root of much of the consternation. Mr. Seibel said setting up the training facilities at the school cost about $3 million and more than half of that, or $1.5 million, went directly to the university. A dispatch last month from the state-run news service, Xinhua, put the payment at $2 million. However, several students said they and faculty members were told the Americans paid just $500,000, a figure that appeared last month in a national newsmagazine, Beijing Review.

“It’s really not enough compared with the work the school has been doing day and night over the last three to four months,” Mr. Li said. He said he has heard similar complaints about the size of the payment from a number of students and professors in recent weeks.

As complaints about the deal with the Americans grew in recent months, the university replaced its top official in charge of business with foreigners. A spokesman for the university who also serves as the head of the propaganda committee for the school’s branch of the Communist Party, Cao Weidong, confirmed the change in leadership, but said it was routine and unrelated to the arrangement with the American Olympic team. “It’s a regular shift of cadres,” he said.

A source close to the university said officials recently asked the Americans to pay more, but they declined. Messrs. Cao and Seibel said they were unaware of such a request.

Mr. Cao insisted that the presence of the Americans was a boon for Beijing Normal. “You need to look at the bigger picture. You can’t just describe the importance of a specific amount of money. We contribute to the Beijing Olympics. We raise the profile of the university in the news, which we see because you are here. And the fact that the U.S. delegation is here boosts the sports-related curriculum,” he said.

Mr. Cao said preparations for the Americans were minimal and involved few maintenance staff. “They would do it anyway regardless as part of their daily work,” he said.

However, Mr. Seibel said most of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s payment was to accelerate construction of new athletic facilities. Most of the training takes place in a new athletic building named for a Beijing Normal alumnus and Hong Kong businessman, Qiu JiDuan, who donated 20 million renminbi, or about $3 million, to the school in 2006.

The American team had a small, exclusively American facility at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, and a much larger center was set up at the American University in Athens in 2004. “It’s a reflection of how competitive the games have become,” Mr. Seibel said.

While the private gyms let American teams practice away from the prying eyes of foreign scouts, Mr. Siebel said the main benefit is the flexibility to have more than just the single 90-minute practice session an American team might be assigned at the Olympic venue. “That leaves 22½ hours for the rest of the day,” he said.