As a senior thinking about applying to graduate school and watching my fellow seniors do the same, I realized there's something here that's driving all of us crazy: application fees and unpaid internships.
If you know anything about college students, it's that we don't really have money. There's a few of us that do, but for the most part, we're poor enough that we have trouble scraping enough money together to buy $1 macaroni or ramen noodle cups, let alone a $75 application fee to a med school in hopes that they will consider our application. But now here I am, in 2015, watching my friends scramble to get their lives together and having to pay people to do so.
In some respects, I understand the point of the application fee. You have to pay people to look over thousands of applications, after all, but there comes a point where $50 dollars and upward per application begins to seem a bit ludicrous. Just listening to my friends as they begin submitting applications gives me secondhand anxiety as they apply to a variety of schools, paying upward of $1500 to do so.
Of course, there are application fee waivers, which are excellent because they help those who are desperately in need and can't afford to pay them. But does that mean the rest of us can really afford to pay $1000 at a time just for the first round of applications? Hardly. As is, most of us can't make that much money because we're too busy focusing on our studies. Even those of us with jobs probably aren't being paid thanks to the wildly increasing trend of "unpaid internships," which are not only exploitative of a young workforce that is desperately in need of money for these very reasons, but may very well be illegal in many cases.
It feels almost like a vicious cycle: you have to go to college you need to be able to pay for it. To pay for it, you need to get a job. To get a job that pays enough to get through college, you already need to have graduated from college. To pay for getting into college alone you have to have money enough to pay through the application fees, unless you apply for the application fee waiver, which has strict enough rules that many people who do need the waiver aren't eligible. It honestly sounds like something out of Wes Craven or Alfred Hitchcock film.
So here's my question: how are we meant to pay for these application fees, whether we're coming out of high school or just about to walk out college, when we don't have the money? With all the money we're making from our unpaid internships? Our parents, who are already struggling to pay our tuition even with the help of our scholarships? Who came up with this idea, anyway?
