What a click bait… this is misleading
Also a lot of people are eligible to waive application fees. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than half.
That’s a lot of money!
Yes, they are. Like totally. And they are also incurring expenses from the unqualified students who don’t know better than to not throw their money away on an app.
Ever since my daughter who is graduating from Vandy this year was applying to colleges, I’ve been curious about the “College Board” and where the money goes. We paid to take and send SAT, AP, and ACT scores to every college plus application fees for each school. Everything is done electronically, so there can’t be that much of an expense anymore. The Common App has make it so easy to apply to additional schools, just check another box and pay another fee. Students applying to selective universities need to apply to several because acceptance rates are so low. Just because they aren’t accepted doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified. Another top student from her high school with similar stats was accepted everyplace Amy was wait-listed and wait-listed everyplace Amy was accepted. It was like they flipped a coin because they have so many qualified applicants.
^ Stats are significant at state schools, but may be as low as 20% of criteria at private schools (where they must indeed be high!).
There is a small college near me - competitive but not very competitive. How much do they spend on admissions? They have eight staff, and if they average $60,000 each - the same as the average 9-month salary for a school teacher, that’s $480,000 on salary alone, Add in fringe benefits, space charges, travel, promotional material etc. and this maybe doubles: call it a million dollars. They get 2000 applications last year, so it costs them somewhere around $500 to process an application.
Their application fee is $40. Clearly this is not a profit center for them.
Just like any industry these days the rich gets richer the poor gets poorer. With common app the kids are applying to more selective colleges and these schools at the top are definitely doing much better in their bottom line than twenty years ago as they have seen an explosion of applications. If UCLA is getting five times more apps are they hiring five times more staff?
These guys are so inefficient and they have so much overhead that they probably lose money on every app they reject. But the more exclusive they appear, the more they can charge the people that get admitted and this more than makes up the (minor) loss on the rejects
All I know is that every day now we have been getting heaps of solicitations to apply at various universities. Its gotta be in the business plan. Some one is paying for all that paper and marketing.