Or some such thing. The fact that college tuition is on the raise, still is old news. I paid as much for my college education as some people pay for a house. Not a house in New York City, but a house nonetheless. Tuition will keep going up despite the desires of the government to go otherwise and so more people will go to state schools or be mired in debt or both. Reality.
What shocked me a little about grad school applications was the cost of simply applying to these schools. It’s not astronomical or anything, but I’m spending over 500 dollars to apply to six schools. Money that I will never see back. “Non-refundable Application Fee.” This seems a little much to me. In the end, we pay for any printing that’s done, any postage, and every other cost that goes into the application, but I still have to shell over 100 bucks just to have the privilege of you opening my envelope? That the fee exists I’m not surprised by, but that it’s as high as it is concerns me a little. I had to luck of not experiencing this for undergrad as I applied early and got accepted to the school, thus only having to pay one application fee, but I can see how these would pile up. At an open house the other day, one of the students said she was applying to 13 different programs. That’s got to be over 1000 dollars in application fees! This is absurd (well, so is the notion of applying to 13 different programs at least to me), but we’ve been taught in the whole application process to try to cover your bases. Have safety schools and reaches and all that type of stuff. I limited myself to programs close to New York that didn’t require a GRE score and still I had 6. It really just seems like another way for schools to siphon funds out of us, and in this case funds that we might not even be able to gain anything from.