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Need-based application fee waivers–not all schools provide them!

Brian Leiter

A student currently in an MA program writes:

I am writing to you at the suggestion of several professors of philosophy, who thought this might deserve the attention of the greater philosophical community. I am in the process of applying to graduate schools in philosophy for Fall 2014 (in the United States and Canada).

I am shocked that there are several institutions that do not offer need-based fee waivers for applications. Many top programs do offer waivers for those with demonstrated need or who qualify based on participation in specific programs, but several major programs (Harvard, UNC*, Toronto, etc.) do not. 

Students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds are already playing a game pitted against them. Besides those things which I surely do not need to repeat, but which are known to keep promising students out of undergraduate and graduate programs, applying to graduate school also means paying $165 for the GRE and $25 for each school a report is sent to.

Everyone is aware of how difficult it is to get into graduate school, and I have not met anyone that is applying to less than 10 schools. Even if half those schools waive their fees, that's $250 in GRE reports and probably close to $500 in the other application fees. With small chances of admittance for even highly-qualified candidates, it seems a poor investment to put in so much money when one is lucky if they have that much disposable money at all. For a student like me, there is no option but to remove my application. What was a small chance becomes no chance.

Schools that do not provide the fee waiver option send the message that they have no interest in students who cannot afford hundreds of dollars in application fees. Financially disadvantaged students are faced with a decision: do they use their limited funds to apply to the (likely higher-ranked and more competitive) program they would love to attend, or do they apply to the program they are more likely to be admitted to?

*At UNC, it's not possible if you had any period of time for which you weren't enrolled; a condition is "no breaks in enrollment from point of entry at the undergraduate level." This seems to target a particularly vulnerable group: people who took time off to work, either during or after undergraduate programs. 

How widespread a problem is this?  Please provide links to other examples.  I assume these policies are overwhelmingly set by the central administration, not the philosophy departments.  Do any departments have their own policies/procedures to waive fees based on economic need?  Signed comments will be very strongly preferred.

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21 responses to “Need-based application fee waivers–not all schools provide them!”

  1. Thursday's Child

    I am sympathetic to the student's concern. But the high rejection rates for admissions to PhD programs is a function of the number of institutions that students apply to. If ALL students applied to half the number of PhD programs, the rejections rates would be substantially lower. Further, if a student needs to apply to a great number of programs in order to get into ONE then the student is not getting good advice on where to apply. I suspect that many students waste the money they do not have applying to too many programs that they are not viable candidates for. Go ahead, apply to some dream schools. But a student need not apply to seven dream schools to be rejected by all. That is a waste of money and it is often quite bad for a student's self-esteem. Let us be wise when applying to graduate schools.

    BL COMMENT: Volume of applications is only one factor in the rejection rate. Another, increasingly important one, is that programs are accepting fewer students. This became noticeable after the 2008 financial collapse, and I'm not sure programs in general have returned to pre-2008 levels (but my evidence here is anecdotal only).

    Reply
  2. Emily

    I am applying to Ph.D. programs in a humanities field (not philosophy) this year; like your correspondent, I am currently enrolled in a master's program. While not especially disadvantaged, I live on my stipend and have no savings or other external support. I am applying to five programs, and the total cost of my application fees, GRE fee + score reports will come in at approximately ~$600, a third of my annual income. I understand that the labor of processing all these applications has to be paid for somehow, but it does not seem fair or reasonable that many universities waive the application fee for students who are currently enrolled in a B.A. program and receiving financial aid, or are participating in certain programs such as AmeriCorps and Teach for America, but not for those for whom the fees present a financial hardship for any other reason. I am sure there are many would-be applicants who struggle more than I do to afford these fees.

    Reply
  3. Roulette winner

    I resent this part of #1: "Further, if a student needs to apply to a great number of programs in order to get into ONE then the student is not getting good advice on where to apply." I applied coming from a terminal MA program, to 14 schools. When the dust (and wait-lists) settled, I got rejected from 12/14, including all of my "safety" programs (some not even in the PGR top-50). Of the two that I got into, one was in the top-5, and that's where I am now. You're certainly right that if everyone applied to fewer programs they would all have higher acceptance rates. But it does not follow that, given that most people do apply to more than 10, needing to do so is evidence of poor selection. From the applicant side the process can appear mysterious. With the number of writing samples committees need to read and the subjectivity involved in judging them it's not at all clear that the 6 unambiguously strongest applicants always float to the top. I've heard that advice to apply to as many places as you can afford to, because with that much noise in the system the outcomes are very difficult to predict.

    Reply
  4. Shawn

    As a potential international applicant, I am sympathetic to your correspondent. I come from a developing country and I go to college largely supported by my parents who do not make much money. Some numbers I can provide include: It takes nearly $500 to take the GRE and TOEFL, and 25 each to send results; programs usually require 80-100 fees; tutoring high school students (as a way of making extra money) in my town is about $5 per hour; part-time on campus jobs are $3-4 on average; my parents' annual income is about $6,000. Whether I shall go to the U.S. for a Ph.D program given my financial status is another issue. I just thus find it quite unfair, sometimes discouraged, that most programs do not take into account applicants' financial need at all. I am not even sure whether international applicants are qualified for fee waivers even if some programs do offer them.

    Reply
  5. Michael B

    Without wishing to derail the thread, is it common in the US for fees to be charged for PhD applications in philosophy? I went to graduate school in the UK and I don't remember seeing a single application fee. But then, it also seems to me funding is a lot more common in the US than in the UK.

    Granted, I was hardly systematic, but I'd not pay an application fee to be merely considered for merely an interview at even a paying job; it reminds me of agencies that say send us money and a photo and maybe we'll find you modelling work.

    (I don't really know much about this stuff though. A decade ago I used to work in a bank where we charged a £20 'administration fee' for letters (a fine per-word rate I must say). I never charged any customer for a letter which is probably a reason I never got very far in business.)

    BL COMMENT: I am not aware of any US program that does not charge an application fee (readers?), but some do offer fee waivers for financial need reasons.

    Reply
  6. David

    I would like to be even more sympathetic to this student's concern than Thursday's Child. First of all, if we're committed to increasing diversity in philosophy then we should make it *easier* for disadvantaged students getting bad advice about where to apply, instead of keeping or making it hard for those very students. Secondly, admissions to PhD programs are erratic enough to make me question how good advice about where to apply could possibly be. Just anecdotally from my own experience, I applied to 19 PhD programs and was admitted to 5. I had excellent advisors who helped me craft an application and writing sample that could do this, and a father willing to loan (and then give, as a graduation present) me the money to apply so widely. It's very plausible that I could have only applied to the 14 that rejected me, particularly if I left out the "dreamy" schools like Michigan that took me. If we want a more diverse field, we should make it much easier for everyone to apply as I did, particularly those who don't have a father or other source willing to supply them with the application fees.

    Reply
  7. Jared

    I would like to second what David is saying, in that my anecdotal findings support the idea that PhD admissions are something of a "crapshoot," to but it bluntly. Schools I thought I had a very good shot at rejected me, while a dream school to which I'd applied with a self-deprecating laugh admitted me. So I'm not much persuaded by the "you should have done better research" line. Yes, this does tend to bloat the applicant pool, because any self-interested student is going to shotgun the application process, sometimes hitting a dozen schools or more. But it looks like the best response for any individual, at least from my (anecdotal) experience.

    Interestingly enough, there is precisely one mechanism in place to prevent this "shotgunning" from becoming absurd: the application fee. Any neoliberal economist would jump on this as evidence that the application fees are not high enough! And it is probably true that, if the fees were higher, professors would not be drowning in applicant pools to the degree they are these days.

    On the other hand, if it were free, any moderately informed undergrad would hit all top-25 schools (I certainly would have). And this goes to another of David's point: it is also possible that this is the kind of behavior we *want* disadvantaged students to take, which to me underscores the importance of need-based waivers across the board. These sorts of considerations — of encouraging upward mobility in academia, of fairness, etc. — must be weighed against the economics of the situation (the macro trends in applicant numbers vs. the individual best-response of perpetuating that very trend).

    Reply
  8. A Grad Student

    I applied to grad programs in philosophy several years ago and in fact very nearly emailed Brian about this very issue at the time. As others have crucially noted, some places that do offer fee waivers will not grant them to students not currently enrolled in a BA program. I had a fellowship the year after graduating (during which I applied to programs), and while the fellowship paid for my expenses that year, I was not allowed to use the money for anything personal (such as grad school applications).

    I was on absolute maximum financial aid as an undergrad and worked numerous jobs, concurrently, in order to minimize the loans I had to take out. Coming out of college I had something like $1500 in savings to my name. Schools like Princeton, CUNY, UNC, and Duke that would not give me fee waivers were essentially flipping a giant middle finger at students like myself who did not have the good fortune to be able to drop $100+ on a single application without major sacrifice. There were several places where one could, while not automatically qualifying for a fee waiver, submit a special request to the graduate school. I did this and was universally denied. I of course recognize, as noted above, that these are graduate school policies and certainly do not necessarily reflect the way philosophy departments would like things to be. Interestingly, at Duke I was directed by the graduate school to petition the department to which I was applying, the policy being that departments could at their own discretion cover the application fees. When I wrote the philosophy department I was told that this was not, in fact, something that was really done.

    At the end of the day I applied to 10 schools, only, I think, 3 of which gave me a fee waiver. It was a major financial difficulty. Several schools I was interested in I did not apply to because spending $70-100 on a crapshoot was just not really possible. Happily, I was accepted at a top-20 program and am enrolled there now, but in virtue of that I have reason to think that I might well have gotten into other top-20 programs I was interested in but to which I did not apply because of fees. Perhaps it will strike some as penny wise and pound foolish to forgo applying to a school because of a $75 fee. But when you need that $75 in savings to help pay for the plane ticket to the city where you will be going to graduate school it is another matter entirely. Grad school is already mostly a game for the middle class and rich. At many programs the stipend is not enough to get by on, or at least not unless you come into the program already owning a car, having some savings, and being able to pay moving expenses–or unless you are willing to take out loans (which, of course, no one should for a philosophy degree). That the deck is further stacked against poor people by making even the application a financial hardship is I think quite an injustice. Additionally, it surely is not healthy for a profession like philosophy to be so insular as to be composed almost entirely of the upper-middle class and above.

    Reply
  9. Leigh

    I agree with David and Jared in questioning Thursday's Child's assertion that applying where one is likely to be rejected means bad advice. My anecdote: I had two advisors advising me on where to apply; they both encouraged me to apply to about half of the PGR's top 10. The highest-ranked program that accepted me was in the upper 30s. Were both my professors seriously incompetent at assessing my chances of acceptance, or did I just not get lucky? Thursday's Child seems to overestimate either the availability of "good advice" on where to apply, or, as David and Jared have suggested, the degree to which acceptance is not a crapshoot.

    Reply
  10. Broke and Frustrated PhD applicant

    As a PhD applicant myself, I wholeheartedly agree with the poster's concerns. The GRE expenses are criminal, and I think philosophy departments should only require official scores of those applicants they are seriously considering accepting, and allow self reported scores in the interim. If this practice were adopted, it would save applicants a tremendous amount of money, while at the same time not compromising anything about the process.

    I also think that some schools are not making the appropriate effort to have reasonable application fees. If my research is correct, Pittsburgh is $50, Wisconsin is $56 and Chicago is $65. So why in the world are some schools' fees $100 dollars or more? Stanford's fee is $125! As much as I'd love to apply there, I'm not interested in attending a school that so robustly disrespects prospective students with such exorbitant fees. It's clear that top programs could have markedly lower fees (as evidenced by the top programs that do), yet they elect not to. This, I think, is a very unfortunate policy that discourages excellent applicants that either A. don't have money or B. do have self respect. Just my 2 cents.

    Reply
  11. Thursday's Child

    Leigh says: "I had two advisors advising me … to apply to about half of the PGR's top 10. The highest-ranked program that accepted me was in the upper 30s. Were both my professors seriously incompetent at assessing my chances of acceptance …? Thursday's Child seems to overestimate either the availability of "good advice" on where to apply, or … the degree to which acceptance is not a crapshoot"

    Leigh, you did get bad advise. That seems obvious. If the best program you got into was in the upper 30s on the Gourmet, you surely should not have been applying to 5 programs in the top 10.
    I do, though, grant that good advice is hard to come by. I am struck by the fact that students do not take advise when it is given. And they often take advise from the wrong people. This is not unique to philosophy, of course.
    I obviously do not know the details of your case, but you should look carefully at the research records of your own advisors. If they seldom publish or publish in obscure places, it was vanity or ignorance on their part to mislead you as they did.

    Reply
  12. anonymous graduate student

    Thursday's Child: We ought to also consider that it seems at least likely that those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged compared to other applicants are also more likely to be coming from undergraduate programs where up-to-date advice about applying is harder to come by, and are less likely to already be "networked" into philosophy. I think there's something very problematic about turning this conversation into one about whether applicants take good advice when they receive it. Even if students *are* supplied with good advice, it seems to me to just be a fact that someone who can afford to apply to 20 schools (and apparently this is becoming common) is at a *significant* advantage over someone who can afford to apply to, say, five. No matter how well-picked those five schools are.

    Just an anecdote: I originally only applied to five schools, mostly for financial reasons. I was accepted to one of them (ranked below 20). I was waitlisted at the only top ten program I applied to, as well as one ranked in the 20s. I didn't have anyone to give me advice about where to apply, really, because I was an undergraduate at a small state university with no grad program and with faculty who weren't (by no fault of their own! They were amazing) super familiar with the current state of the game or how I would compete against students at other schools. I feel fairly confident that if I had applied to 20 schools, I probably would have gotten into somewhere that was Leiter-ranked higher (I happen to think the department I ended up in deserves a higher ranking, but I'll just stick to what we have to go on here). I didn't think I had much of a chance coming from a not-really-recognized department.

    I just reapplied to three top ten programs, and was given advice by multiple people who are both extremely knowledgeable about the current state of play and generally trustworthy about professional matters *not* to bother applying to the one out of these three programs that accepted me. (They thought certain factors in my application–including the fact that I was already enrolled in a PhD program, and that they felt I wasn't as good of a fit here as I was at the other two schools–would make my current department not interested in me.) So even seemingly good advice from well-connected people who regularly review files can be wrong.

    I think this issue is extremely important. In a lot of cases I suspect it is something that is probably quite hard for a department to do anything about (since the application fee and policy is probably set by the graduate school), but I hope that more attention gets paid to it… thanks for posting this.

    BL COMMENT: This will be the final comment on the question of how many schools students should apply to. We now return to the topic: fee waivers for financial need, which schools aren't providing them, how widespread the problem is, etc.

    Reply
  13. Another Grad Student

    Is it necessary for programs to require official GRE reports (at a cost of $25 to the applicant) at the time of application, vs. accepting students conditional on the GRE information reported by the student being fully matched by an official report submitted after acceptance? This really does seem like an overwhelming expense for students who do not have family wealth to draw on. [I understand that these decisions may be made at the university, rather than the department, level.]

    Reply
  14. Expat Grad student

    I applied to grad schools last year, and am now enrolled. I got 3 fee waivers out of ten applications (with 5 possible fee waivers). These were all mid- and upper-ranked schools. At the time I was not enrolled anywhere, but was living alone and making minimum wage, which I pointed out on my waiver applications.

    Reply
  15. Applicant Currently Breaking the Bank

    "GRE expenses are criminal"

    Reply
  16. Dan B.

    I am also in the process of Ph.D applications. I agree that application fees are a significant burden; however I think some of the other grad students are correct in identifying GRE reports as an especially egregious cost. What is the point of it anyways? And what about the people (who may be excellent at philosophy) who may score poorly on a timed test? Seems both unfair and a blatant money grab.

    BL COMMENT: This doesn't make sense. The money goes to the GRE, not the schools. Many schools do find that the GRE provides a useful check, and is helpful for interdepartmental comparisons.

    Reply
  17. Anonymous graduate student

    Another anecdote:

    After I made the decision to apply to graduate programs, my undergraduate advisors and I came up with a strategic list of about 12 schools spanning the entirety of the PGR. I soon came to realize, however, that I could only afford to apply to about eight of them, in part because not every program on my list had a fee-waiver options. So I came up with a new, shortened version of the initial list and told my advisors that eight was about all I could afford. Though they found the idea that I was planning on only applying to eight schools troubling, there wasn't anything I could do about it. I just didn't have the money.

    I would up applying to all 12 programs and I was admitted at a few – some of which were a better fit than others. The program that fit best, however, whose admittance I would up accepting, wasn't on my shortened list because they didn't have a fee-waiver option.

    Had my advisor not generously loaned me the money to apply to the four schools I cut off my list, I most certainly would have been priced out of philosophy.

    Unsurprisingly, I'm sympathetic to the claim above that philosophy is a rich man's game.

    Reply
  18. Julia

    It sounds like this problem is mostly generated not by philosophy programs, but by general university policies, which are probably hard to change. But it seems like things could be made easier as follows: schools could allow self-reported GRE and Toefl scores, with official scores only required upon acceptance of an offer. This saves between 25 and 50 bucks per application.
    Moreover, I wonder if it would be possible to set up some kind of a charity fund through the APA? For example, upon registering for a conference or when renewing one's APA membership, there could be an option to donate some money to disadvantaged applicants. I am sure a lot of people would chip in a few bucks. Then students who want to apply for PhD programs, and who can demonstrate financial need, can apply to the APA for help with their application fees. One might argue that preference should be given to minority students when there isn't enough money for everyone. I don't know how many people would apply for this sort of thing in a given year, and hence I don't know how much work it would be to deal with the applications, but I think it might be easier to set up than to get every school to change their application fee policies.

    Reply
  19. Another Grad Student

    Though this doesn't address the question of what philosophy departments are or aren't doing, current applicants should be aware that there's a common application fee waiver for those applying to *some* members of the Committee on Institutional Development (Big Ten and U of Chicago). See: http://www.cic.net/students/freeapp/introduction The waivers are decided by each institutions graduate school. I applied last year and received 2 out of 3 waivers.

    Even with these waivers, applying was a financial burden. I was fortunate that my parents were able and willing to chip in on some of the costs. Had that not been the case I probably would have had to reduce my applications from 12 to 7 or 8.

    I agree with the suggestions that departments, when they can, should allow students to submit unofficial scores prior to acceptance. Additionally some schools allowed uploaded scans of official transcripts prior to acceptance (If I remember correctly, Notre Dame and Ohio State allowed this, though I am unsure at what level this decision was made). Transcript costs might not seem like much, but people coming from MA programs have at least two sets to send for every application.

    Reply
  20. PhD Applicant

    I see that the suggestion of accepting tentative, self-reported GRE scores and then requesting official scores only of those who make it to the final rounds is a popular idea among the applicants. I am curious to know what someone in a position of wisdom (and unparalleled influence in the field)like Dr. Leiter thinks of this idea? Unless there is some reason I have missed that diminishes the efficacy of such a suggestion, perhaps those at the top could use their position of power to push for change?

    BL COMMENT: See the next comment by Prof. Kremer, which speaks to some of the obstacles. If other faculty have ideas about this-, please post. Perhaps the APA can do something to establish a norm for philosophy programs?

    Reply
  21. Michael Kremer

    It does seem that there could be a mechanism, as discussed above, for asking initially only for self-reported GRE scores, then asking for official verification from students who make some sort of cut, or who are admitted. The first option seems undesirable in that departments would probably not want to send a signal to students that they had "made a cut," especially as most such students would not be admitted anyway. On the second option, students would have to understand that admissions decisions could be rescinded is the official verification did not match self-reported scores, and departments would have to make decisions in sufficient time for offical scores to be recorded.

    A difficulty with all of this is that admissions requirements such as GREs are set at higher administration levels than the department, and modifications would therefore apply to many admitting departments at any institution, not just Philosophy — and this would require all such departments to agree on the new policy, I imagine.

    Reply

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