Usacollegechat Podcast

Welcome back after our Thanksgiving break. We hope your holiday was not ruined by college application hysteria. With about a month to go until many application deadlines hit, we would like to take up a practical topic that might affect how many applications your teenager is thinking about submitting in a few weeks. That topic is application fees. 1. The Cost For some of you, the cost of submitting an application--which is likely to be somewhere between $35 and $75 per application--is not a big deal. Even if your teenager applies to 10 or 15 schools with fees on the higher side, that cost of perhaps $1,000 is not critical in your financial picture. However, for many families, coming up with even $500 is a significant issue. A lot is written in the education press about the notion that application fees, even reasonable ones, do actually keep some kids from applying to college--especially lower-income kids and first-generation college-goers. All of us interested in improving the educational lives of our nation’s