<p>Do people realize how much money colleges rake in on the application process?Take a standard number say 25,000 people who apply at 70 bucks an app= ONE MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!What are thier costs to review these apps? No where near this amount I am sure .</p>
<p>And do you realize HOW MANY PEOPLE UNIVERSITIES HAVE TO EMPLOY TO READ THE 25,000 APPLICATIONS, AND HOW MUCH IT COSTS TO PRINT ALL THE PAMPHLETS, LEAD ALL THE TOURS, ANSWER ALL THE PHONES, PAY FOR ALL THE TRAVEL, CREATE ALL WEBSITES?</p>
<p>Please take your epiphany and, well, never mind.</p>
<p>They do get a lot of money. OTOH, I’m sure they do have costs associated with reading the applications. In addition to the admissions officers’ time, they have to subsidize all the people who use fee waivers.</p>
<p>Do they make a profit off of application fees? Probably. But big colleges also have professors to pay, expensive research to fund, libraries to fill, dorms and classrooms to maintain, students to feed, house, and otherwise provide for, infrastructure to maintain, student activities to fund, and scholarships to pay for. So whatever you pay in application fees, you will eventually get back in services as a college student.</p>
<p>$1.75M? That’s probably equivalent to Harvard’s postage and printing budget for each year’s brochures and recruitment materials.</p>
<p>Your “startling fact” just isn’t.</p>
<p>In all likelihood brochures cost less than $10. In all likelihood their shipping costs are less than $2. The vast majority of applications are now submitted online so printing costs are negligible to non-existent. Massive profits? Probably not, but if you think App fees isn’t a profit center you’re kidding yourself.</p>
<p>There’s one Ivy that is always sending us stuff via e-mail and snail mail. My son would have virtually no chance of getting accepted into the school, and I’m starting to get annoyed, feeling like they really don’t want him but rather just another application and the hefty application fee that goes along with it.</p>
<p>I do think a lot of the application fees are higher than they should be, but there are some that actually go in the other direction. My son is applying to one school that doesn’t charge an application fee to ANYONE and to another whose fee is only $30.</p>
<p>Colleges outsource many recruiting jobs – including all the spamming you’re getting fosterte (agreed, ridiculously annoying). As for massive profit centers – Harvard go 34,285 apps last year. Is it $75? Let’s assume that 32,000 actually paid the fee. That’s $2.4M in revenue. How does it compare?</p>
<p>Last year Harvard college awarded $170 M in financial aid. </p>
<p>Their endowment valued at $30.7 billion as of June 30, down $1.3 billion (4.1 percent) from $32 billion a year earlier. This followed the positive 21.4 percent investment return earned in fiscal 2011 and the 11.0 percent return in the prior year.</p>
<p>I doubt whatever they net from is not stressing anyone out nor making people grin broadly…</p>
<p>Certainly H is an outlier – and it wouldn’t surprise me that some schools do see the extra funds (if any) as an additional resource – but for a good many schools, it’s a proverbial bucket drop.</p>
<p>My guess is that high app fees (>$50) are intended to help yield rates more than raise revenue. If an applicant is willing to fork over cash, then he is more serious about the prospective university than someone who only needs to fill out some paperwork.</p>
<p>Hi fees also serve to dissuade the “why not” applicants. Lower fees would lower admissions rates – right? Can you imagine if HYP had $15 app fees? </p>
<p>Plus, you know that many of these fluff apps could be read and discarded in under a minute. </p>
<p>If people believe that top colleges are inordinately focused on the admit rate…</p>
<p>Even if the colleges say they are non profit you can believe that none survive without it.Its a business.If you can show me the figures where it cost 1.75 to process 25k app. then do it.There is no way!!Show me where Harvard spent 2.4 million on thier admissions and I will show you where aliens live.So do you think its fair that with Stanford for example they admit 2400 students and roll in 5 million in app fees.Is it fair that students subsidize thier college when they are not admitted.To say that Harvard spend 1.75 million in recruitment material is bogus.“So whatever you pay in application fees, you will eventually get back in services as a college student” not if you are not admitted which most are not.</p>
<p>Wayold, you’re still missing an important point: at a large university such as Harvard (since that’s the name that’s been brought up), $2.4 million isn’t “big money.” For example, for fiscal 2011, the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011, Harvard’s revenues were about $3,780,000,000 (up about $40 million from the year before) and its expenses were about $3,910,000,000. (Yes, this means Harvard ran a deficit in FY 2011. Source: [Harvard’s</a> $130-million deficit in 2011 | Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2012](<a href=“http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/deficit-days]Harvard’s”>http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/deficit-days)) </p>
<p>The $2,400,000 that we’re positing here is about 0.06% of Harvard’s operating budget–the equivalent of about $60 to a household with an annual income of $100,000. That’s enough money that if you dropped it in the street, I guess you’d go back and look for it, but it’s hardly “big money.”</p>
<p>As for your question “Is it fair that students subsidize thier [sic] college when they are not admitted[?]” my answer is yes. First of all, I do believe that it probably does cost over $2 million per year to run Harvard admissions. Their business involves much more than just postage and application-reading. There are significant travel and other marketing expenses. Furthermore, if there is surplus, where’s the harm in that? It’s not as if Harvard is arm-twisting 35,000 seniors a year to apply for admission to the College.</p>
<p>I think the cost to read an application is close to or exceeds the cost of applying. </p>
<p>Lets take the case of Harvard. They are reviewed by several committees. It is fair to say that at least an hour of total time is spent per application (reading, database management, sending decisions, etc). Even at lower-ranked schools such as Tufts, there are two readers who spend 15 min on average each. </p>
<p>So how much is that time worth? Some members of the adcom make over 100K and others such as the secretary maybe 40k. But the average would be at least 70k given the professors who are on the committee. Over a 250-day workyear, that’s $300 a day or $40 an hour. </p>
<p>To cross-check, an adcom member for MIT said that he read 10,000 applications in ten years. 1000 application in one year at 70k salary would be $70 per application.</p>
<p>Not very far off from my guess.</p>
<p>Add in the space, equipment, and other costs, I think the cost could very well be more than $75.</p>
<p>It take 15 minutes to review an app.and lets say two people do it so thats a half hour
those people are not paid 70 an hour.At the most 20 an hour.Aot of the process is outsourced.You are assuming all the apps.are reviews by a 70k employee.Not happening.Not today not ever.I will agree the final apps are read by a senoir adcom or two but not 25k worth.</p>
<p>Clearly, you’re going to believe what you want to believe.</p>
<p>I’ll be looking forward to your upcoming thread detailing what you saw on the grassy knoll.</p>
<p>Even if a school makes 50% profit off their admissions department, who cares? Do you have a better way for them to balance their budgets? This is the price you pay for small classes, research opportunities, good FA, nice dorms, and other things that draw people to top schools. If you subsidize, say, Princeton students and get rejected and end up at Dartmouth, Dartmouth rejects will subsidize you, so it all balances out.</p>
<p>My point I want to make is that colleges are making big bucks off college admission at the expense of thier applicants, most of which will never attend.Its like paying for gas in your car but you do not get any because you were not good enought.Most dorms I see are crap by the way and if you do a tour they only show you the best one which you cannot afford or will never be selected for.Basically most colleges rip off thier students for the quality of education they provide.</p>
<p>And what’s your solution to this “outrage”? Cap applications to Stanford and Harvard? </p>
<p>With your logic, one should ban lottery ticket sales after the first few million sold.</p>
<p>“Basically most colleges rip off thier students for the quality of education they provide” I was a Fin Aid recipient to an Ivy. It was cheaper for my family than my in-state flagship school. I didn’t call the cops after they handed me my diploma.</p>
<p>Hows this-if you are not accepted you refund the student who applies.As far as the lotteries go-thats for making the government money and only the very select few people who win which the government takes most of thier money also.So you didn’t call the cops because you were one of the select few who got thier monies worth.Think of the average retention rate of most colleges.Pretty poor except for the selects.Year after year the averege colleges are taking students and parents money while providing a crappy education only to see thier freshman drop out because they should not have been there in the first place but the colleges admitted them because they wanted thier money.</p>
<p>Seriously? Refund the application fees of students who are not accepted? That would certainly turn admissions offices from cash cows (if they were cash cows, which I still don’t think they are) into money losers.</p>
<p>Selective institutions would receive way more applications than they do now, and their costs would skyrocket. But their revenue would be capped because they can’t accommodate more freshmen than they already do. And there would be an explosion of freeloaders who have no real shot at admission, but no reason not to say “What the hell? I’ll go ahead and apply to Harvard, too” because applying to Harvard would be risk-free.</p>
<p>An application fee is a user fee that covers the administrative costs of the admissions process. Really, what applicants are funding is not the attendance of admitted students, but outreach: mailings, recruitment travel, etc. They’re underwriting the costs of colleges’ increasing the competition against them. There’s irony in that, to be sure, but I don’t see anything to be outraged about. Especially since, as I said before, applying to a particular college is always voluntary.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROIDX using CC</p>
<p>My sympathies to you wayold, since you’re about to embark on part of the Great American college rip off. Try not to lose too much money.</p>
<p>Make sure you don’t major in NFP or Education administration.</p>