Skip to main content

Undergraduate application fees, 2020

I often wonder if we'd have an application fee if we were creating the admissions process from scratch today.  But we do, and there are actually some good reasons for doing so, not the least of which is that it costs a lot of money to process and manage applications.

Some people have wondered aloud whether app fees are simply a money-making enterprise for colleges, and the answer is yes, no, and sort of.  We can't think of universities as charities, and the people doing the work of admissions have to get paid; conceptually, it makes sense to charge a fee to applicants, since some substantial percentage of them will never pay tuition on your campus.

But it's too easy and incorrect to multiply applications by the app fee and assume that money flows into the admissions office.  Even at those universities where the streams are directed to admissions rather than into a general fund, some substantial percentage of students get a fee waiver.  And, as you'll see, about half of the post-secondary options in the US don't charge an application fee at all.

Do you like Higher Ed Data Stories, and do you use it in your work?  If so, you can help contribute to my webhosting and software costs and time by buying me a coffee.  Just click here. (If you're a high school counselor or work at a CBO, please skip right over that link.)

There are four views here;

Universe shows all 6,400+ post secondary institutions in IPEDS, arrayed and colored by the 2020 undergraduate application fee.  Use the filters to limit the colleges displayed, and use the Highlight box to find one particular institution.

By Carnegie Types arrays app fees by, well, Carnegie types, using a box-and-whisker plot.  The points are colored by institutional control, and you can filter if you'd like.

Distributions shows a count for every application fee listed, and the number of colleges charging that amount.  As you can see, $0, $50, and $100 fees are the most popular, but some colleges charge $1, $2, or even--for some reason--$99.  (I didn't vet these, so of course there may be data entry errors by the people filling out the surveys.)

Finally, Listing is just a bar chart of all the fees.  Scroll down and see, or use the box at the top to filter to some institutions based on a key word.

Let me know if these views surprise you, or if you have other topics that might be of interest.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged.  So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet.  Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher.  Got a guess?  If  you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so.  If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent.  T...
Post a Comment
Read more