You’ve done it all. Junior year you started visiting schools, travelling all over to visit them. You wrote and perfected your essay. You’ve decided where you want to apply. You’ve finished your supplemental essays. You’ve filled out the common app and now, its time to submit; but submitting is the worst part. The application takes forever and is extremely expensive. Almost all colleges have an application fee – from ivy leagues to state schools. The fees range from 50 to 75 dollars, so if you apply to 10 schools you could be paying a maximum of 750 dollars just in the application fee; you also have to pay to send out your ACT Scores, SAT Scores, and the CSS profile. Applying to college can be extremely costly, but should it be?

I personally don’t think it’s fair to charge such an expensive fee to apply to college. College tuitions including room and board, except for state schools, are roughly anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000 a year. College is expensive, so why should I pay to apply to schools when one of them will be getting all of my birthday money and graduation gifts I’ve saved up, others will be getting many other students, and some of them won’t even accept me in the first place?

Others might argue that in fact, by paying the fee, students are keeping the cost of college “down” as the colleges can raise hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars from these fees. However, this makes me concerned that schools cost $50,000 to $60,000 a year, yet still need to raise this much money. How did society let higher education become this expensive?

The high cost just to send in an application is very frustrating to my peers and me. There is no reason why we should be paying to send in papers with information on them. Colleges should allow us to send in our application without any cost because of the fact that we have an interest in their college. Money is a struggle for some people and paying to go to college is a struggle for people, so there is no reason that sending in application should be a struggle for people.

By Gabriella DePinho’17, Staff Writer