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Introduction

Receiving a high-quality education in the United States is a privilege that has become increasingly inaccessible for many Americans throughout the country, from preschool all the way up through college and graduate school. While more people are attending college than ever before, social and economic inequality throughout the nation has placed an incredible financial burden on college students hailing from both the lower and middle classes. Tuition has skyrocketed over the past decades and has shown no signs of slowing down. Room and board costs often exceed the market rates for renting similar properties in the area, meal plans are expensive, and many students get tied up in additional fees and expenses.

To add insult to injury, almost every single college charges a $50-100 application fee for the chance to pay them tens (even hundreds) of thousands of dollars, a fixed-cost tax that disproportionately affects the lower and middle classes while being trivial for the upper class. While only a drop in the vast bucket that is college expenses, the application fee represents a lazy and greedy practice by higher education institutions to squeeze more money from prospective students, many of whom will not be accepted into said universities due to low acceptance rates. With this act of greed, these institutions also deepen the divide in the nation that is wealth and education inequality as well as prevent some of the nation’s brightest minds from applying to our top institutions.

It is imperative to ban this practice of charging application fees for higher education institutions at the national level. This message must reach our state and federal representatives.

 

National Statistics

In the United States, approximately 6,000,000 college applications are processed each year for about 1,000,000 prospective students. Assuming a (relatively modest) $60 application fee on average, that means about $360,000,000 are spent on college application fees per year, or $360 per student.

Keep in mind that in 2019, US savings account holders had an average of $41,600 and a median of $5,300 according to the Federal Reserve. That means for a family with median savings, they would need to spend upwards of 6-7% of their savings just to apply to the average number of colleges to which their peers apply.

 

Case Study - Harvard University

Harvard is one of the most prestigious institutions in the world and a crown jewel of the education system in the United States. With that said, Harvard is the pinnacle of greed when it comes to its application fee, largely due to its low acceptance rates as well as its overwhelming endowment.

As of September 2022, Harvard charges an $85 application fee. Generally, Harvard receives about 40,000 applications per year, accepting around 2,000 of them, resulting in a 5% acceptance rate. That means they bring in roughly $3.4 million in application fees alone, $3.2 million of which is from students that will only receive a few minutes of someone reviewing their application and an email informing them of their rejection.

At the time of writing this, Harvard’s endowment is $53.2 billion (yes, BILLION). Assuming a modest 7.5% annual growth rate, it would take about 6 hours for Harvard to cover the cost of the application fees it charges from interest alone, assuming that they truly need $85 to process the application of each student (they don’t).

An institution with a $53 billion dollar endowment taking money from lower and middle class families for the opportunity of an education is not only immoral, but should be illegal.

 

Case Study - Penn State

Penn State is widely regarded as a strong public school and a viable option for both in-state and out-of-state students. It also serves as an example that sits in the torso of the endowment size distribution, demonstrating that removing application fees is not infeasible for schools outside of the top 5 schools.

The Penn State school system receives about 100,000 applications per year and charges $65 per application, bringing the total revenue from application fees to $6.5 million dollars. With their $3.4 billion endowment, it would take Penn State 9 days of interest to recover lost revenue from application fees. This does not include the state funding that it receives from taxpayers, making their application fee even more of an affront to Pennsylvania residents.