I’m sure this question has been asked many times, but I haven’t found a satisfactory answer yet.
I come from a low income family and qualify for the CommonApp fee waiver. Does that mean I can apply to every college for free? Here’s a screenshot of the fee waiver page I’m looking at:
My counselor mentioned a fee waiver thingy by College Board that gives me 4 free applications, but I’m not sure this is the same thing. Thanks!
The link got blanked but the website is “imgur” and the rest of the url is after a slash.
From the Common App web site:
“The Common Application has a specific process for students who apply using a fee waiver. If you have received (or are eligible to receive) an SAT fee waiver, you may apply to any Common App college without a fee.”
So you can apply to any Common App school for free, and save the 4 CollegeBoard application fee waivers for those schools (e.g. Univ. of California) that don’t take the Common App.
Thank you, my career center lady told me flat out I wouldn’t be able to get a waiver for all 15 apps and I was freaking out about not being able to pay. Cheers to her being wrong!
if you are eligible for a college board waiver, you can talk to your school counselor about using the NACAC waiver. download it at http://www.nacacnet.org/studentinfo/feewaiver/documents/applicationfeewaiver.pdf. It has very clear edibility requirements listed on the form (same reqs as for collegeboard for the most part).
I’m not sure about how it’s executed by the counselor, since the form itself should be filled out for each school. We’ve never had an issue and the ‘fee waiver’ shows up in commonapp as ‘submitted’ if you add a new school. It may be that the counselor fills out something specific in commonapp that is the equivalent of this form.
We’ve never had any school ask for follow-up if the school used commonapp, and Ds all applied to more than 4 schools.