Student story: Overcoming financial obstacles to college
About this video
A student explains that in her junior year the scariest part of applying to university was the cost, since applications can cost up to 80 dollars per school. At a QuestBridge conference she learned about fee waivers, which you can usually get from your guidance counselor or by contacting a university's admissions office.
You'll be able to
- explain why application fees can be a barrier to applying to college.
- describe what a fee waiver is.
- name two places to ask for a fee waiver.
Key words
- application fee
- Money a college charges to process your application, up to about 80 dollars per school in this video.
- fee waiver
- Permission to skip paying the application fee, often for students from low-income families.
- guidance counselor
- A school staff member who helps students plan for college and careers.
- admissions office
- The part of a university that handles applications and decides who is admitted.
Transcript
- So I think when I was first thinking about university it was probably my junior year of high school. The scariest part about the process for me was definitely going to be the cost of actually applying to schools. I did a preliminary search and saw that it costs up to 80 dollars to apply to each individual school and so one of my big concerns going into the process was definitely about whether or not I'd be able to afford to apply to a lot of schools.
No, I was actually not aware of fee wavers at the time until of course I found out through Quest Bridge. The way I found out about this process actually is the summer after my junior year of high school I attended a Quest Bridge conference actually here at Yale University where kind of the Quest Bridge team talked to low income students about, not only the process of actually applying to schools, but also about the different benefits that you can take advantage of such as fee wavers that you could usually get from your guidance counselor or via contacting the admissions office for universities.
Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.