How to eliminate grad application fees

[fizzycist]

I'm looking into how to eliminate grad application fees for my dept's PhD programs. Our Uni/College won't provide resources or support, but they won't stand in the way.

Seems the options are:
1. Find magical funds to pay the fees for all 200+ applicants (haha not gonna happen).
2. Take in all application materials by email, including ref letters.
3. Build some secure web application infrastructure that IT won't support. (hardest part still ref letters?)
4. Pay 3rd party like AcademicJobsOnline or CollegNET? Dunno the price for this, would need to be cheap, like <$10/application.

Options 2-4 would involve privately reviewing materials as a dept and then routing all accepted offers as new applications (incl fees) through the Uni, but that is manageable.

Does anyone have experience with this process?

[dismalist]

Why would you want to do this, fizzy?

[fizzycist]

Why would you want to do this, fizzy?

increase quantity, quality, and diversity of applicant pool.

Also, I find these app fees to be just really dumb. We spend so much time trying to recruit strong cohorts of PhD students who are vital to the teaching and research success of our dept...only to make them pay for the privilege of applying?

[dismalist]

Why would you want to do this, fizzy?

increase quantity, quality, and diversity of applicant pool.

Also, I find these app fees to be just really dumb. We spend so much time trying to recruit strong cohorts of PhD students who are vital to the teaching and research success of our dept...only to make them pay for the privilege of applying?

You have good points, fizzy, many.

Application fees have two purposes: One is to cover the cost of processing applications. Two is to deter frivolous applications.

If you got extra funding you could cover cost one, but you would lose function two.

If the application fee is not astronomical, I think it's a mistake to drop it. Of course, size matters.

Best of luck.

[arcturus]

My university waives the application fee for some students who meet specific criteria. To get the paperwork completed on time, students must start the application weeks in advance of the application deadline. You may want to ask your administration if they are willing to consider such a policy. Otherwise, the application fee serves two useful purposes: (1) pays for the administrative overhead associated with processing applications (not direct to the department, but at the university level) and (2) limits the number of schools students apply to, thereby reducing the work associated with supporting the applicants (letters of ref) and reviewing applicants (serving on the grad admissions committee). I realize that (2) is the exact opposite of your stated goal, but I think it is important. If students apply to too many schools, the system becomes overwhelmed: too much work reviewing applicants that are not going to say yes.

To reduce the costs of applying to graduate school, your department can choose not to require the GRE and use unofficial transcripts. Taking the GRE, sending score reports, and sending official transcripts cost $$.

ETA: dismalist beat me to it.  But I am posting anyway!

[dismalist]

My university waives the application fee for some students who meet specific criteria. To get the paperwork completed on time, students must start the application weeks in advance of the application deadline. You may want to ask your administration if they are willing to consider such a policy. Otherwise, the application fee serves two useful purposes: (1) pays for the administrative overhead associated with processing applications (not direct to the department, but at the university level) and (2) limits the number of schools students apply to, thereby reducing the work associated with supporting the applicants (letters of ref) and reviewing applicants (serving on the grad admissions committee). I realize that (2) is the exact opposite of your stated goal, but I think it is important. If students apply to too many schools, the system becomes overwhelmed: too much work reviewing applicants that are not going to say yes.

To reduce the costs of applying to graduate school, your department can choose not to require the GRE and use unofficial transcripts. Taking the GRE, sending score reports, and sending official transcripts cost $$.

ETA: dismalist beat me to it.  But I am posting anyway!

You added value, arcturus.

[Puget]

I agree with others that waiving fees for those with financial need rather than just dropping them altogether is probably the way to go.

The trick is you want more strong candidates, but not necessarily more total candidates. No fees becomes the grad equivalent of the common app for undergrads, where there is little disincentive to apply broadly (regardless of actual fit or chances of admission).

There is already an informal pre-screening process for PhD programs in the lab sciences (at least for students in the know)-- it is standard practice to email prospective mentors before applying, saying a bit about your match with their lab, attaching a CV, and inquiring if they are planning to take a student that year. Only if they are and express that it seems like the student would be a good fit and strong applicant should the student go ahead with the application. Of course, not all students know to do this if they haven't gotten good mentoring. So I'd be in favor of providing explicit instructions on the webpage that they should do so before applying. Outside the lab sciences, the admissions committee could field such pre-submission inquiries.

I will note, however, that there are often disincentives for programs to take steps to reduce the number of applicants, even if it would narrow it to more qualified applicants and save committee time and non-qualified applicants' money. e.g., rankings based in part on program selectivity.

[doc700]

My program dropped the GRE and our applicant pool increased in quantity. We probably got 50% more applicants. It did not increase in quality.  We probably had the same number of highly qualified applicants applying and a bunch of new completely unqualified applicants (ie did not complete the undergrad program, had C/D average, rec letters from the dorm RA and the music teacher for a science PhD program etc).  It was just more to sift through.

My university makes it extremely easy to get a fee waiver based on financial need.  The applicant asks some questions about their circumstances and if they check certain boxes they get a pop-up asking if they want a fee waiver.  There is no separate process for getting a fee waiver and it can be done at the same time as the normal application (no separate earlier deadline).  Of course the applicant needs to have already started the applicant to get to that point so many people might have been deterred before they got to that part?

[dismalist]

[b]My program dropped the GRE and our applicant pool increased in quantity. We probably got 50% more applicants. It did not increase in quality. We probably had the same number of highly qualified applicants applying and a bunch of new completely unqualified applicants (ie did not complete the undergrad program, had C/D average, rec letters from the dorm RA and the music teacher for a science PhD program etc). [/b]
...

I ran a program with no GRE [didn't bug me, no calculus on the GRE, so useless]. Modest application fee [was out of my hands anyway].

Because administrators have no clue, it was quite easy to begin to require Calc I as an application requirement, with a B minimum, when it suited me. And add more Calc as a requirement within the program.

People, upon the discernible quality improvement, application numbers exploded! The program growed.

What one does affects not only numbers, but also quality. Certainly at low numbers, there is not necessarily a tradeoff. Get more and better.

Nota bene: Watch the competition, hawk like.

[fizzycist]

Dismalist, Puget, arcturus and others make a good point that if every program were to remove all application fees then it might lead to students applying to too many programs and bloat the admin costs of doing grad admissions for everyone.

But most programs aren't eliminating fees, so we aren't yet to this problem. I just want to figure out the best way to do it for my program to give us a competitive edge.

I'm not too concerned with the hassle of reviewing a larger number of applications. For our program that would still be a good deal, the admissions committee could handle it.

But I am concerned with the mechanics of how it is done. If the applications come via email attachments from a thousand places it adds to the admin burden and could lead to mistakes. So has anyone outsourced this to a 3rd party like AJO, CollegeNet, etc? Or anyone have experience building an application portal through their dept's website?

[Hibush]

We use CollegeNet to accept and assemble applications. It seems to do that job acceptably. I find that it is way to clunky for reading and evaluating the applications, so we export each application to a PDF and the list of students to a spreadsheet. That makes reading and scoring against our rubric so much easier than the tiny porthole they let you look through on CollegeNet. I suppose you could spend a lot of time setting up the scoring and such on CollegeNet to work with how you do admission decisions. I can easily keep the whole applicant pool on a single spreadsheet and sort or filter on individual columns as needed. We have to generate admission letters separately, so that wouldn't happen through CollegeNet in any case. We can track acceptances that way, though.

Our schools policy seems to be to grant waiver to anyone who claims to need one, and will push them on to people who attend recruiting events aimed at broadening the pool. That seems to address the affordability limitation to pool size. So far the number of nonsense applications has been small enough to take only a few minutes per recruiting season to triage.

[fizzycist]

Thank you for your perspective, Hibush!

Were you involved with negotiating with CollegeNet or was it a contract with your entire uni? Do you have any idea how much they charge and whether they would sell their product to one individual dept?

[Hegemony]

All our applications are done 100% online. The previous system was called GradWeb, but we're about to change to a new system, and I don't know the name of that one. But it's certainly doable. And someone is paying for the system. The question is where the mandate to pay is coming from. For instance, does some administrative office decree that every department must pay a certain share of the cost of administering admissions? If so, maybe you can pay that cost out of your general departmental funds.

However, I agree that the real thing that will increase applications is eliminating the GRE requirement. When we did that, our number of applications jumped. And as far as we could tell, the GRE scores didn't add much to the application. Almost all of our applicants have GRE scores that one could characterize as "fairly good," so they didn't serve to distinguish one applicant from another. The writing samples and statements of purpose were much more varied. And we had one applicant with terrible GRE scores who was admitted anyway (because some of us argued on his behalf) and has proven to be our superstar graduate. Plus, they're a hassle to take and expensive, and rely on a certain type of undergraduate education. And eliminating them is free for you. Eliminate that requirement and see how you do before tackling the application fee.

[fizzycist]

Hegemony,

Thanks very much for your perspective. We already got rid of GREs a few years ago. Applications went up, but still not as high as I'd like. And now that most other programs have cut GRE, there isn't much of a competitive advantage.

Our uni has a central grad office that runs the application system and charges ~$75/application. Paying for waivers for all ($15k+/yr) would be way way more than my Chair is willing to spend. Dept budgets at my uni are tight and trying to squeeze even a few k/yr from other units/higher levels is, IME, never worth the effort, begging, haggling, future favors, etc.

if I could just pay the waivers from my own single-PI grants I probably would. Totally worth it for improving my dept and perhaps even considering just my own research group. But of course that is not allowed, and my personal discretionary accts are not big enough to consider this, so I need to find a cheaper solution.

[Hibush]

Thank you for your perspective, Hibush!

Were you involved with negotiating with CollegeNet or was it a contract with your entire uni? Do you have any idea how much they charge and whether they would sell their product to one individual dept?

The whole school used CollegeNet, with undergraduate admissions being the driver. That department has figured out how to make it work for them and the staff in that department use it all the time. The faculty who work on graduate admissions just encounter the system once a year, which is why the hybrid approach is good enough.

Like you, recruiting the best grad applicants from a broader range of schools is an objective. The fees just seem to be one of the very last barriers. You may be able to do that selectively. The biggest barrier experienced by prospective applicants is that our specific grad program is unknown to faculty at a many schools, or known as a abstract and unreachable entity. (Were in applied non-medical biology, and the biology students are to a great extent either pre-med and care about the biology only of people, or health-tech related and not grad-school bound. The rest of biology and its application is comparatively uninteresting.) What has been most helpful is getting to know faculty at prospective feeder schools who work on topics related to our program. Asking them about undergrads who do reserach projects in their lab focuses our effort on a much smaller group of students who are likely to have relevant interests and tested research potential. That's a big effort for a return, but so far feels worthwhile.