Zach Miller has spent more than $250 on applications to five different schools. Of the five, none have cost him more than his application to Syracuse University.

SU’s $70 undergraduate application fee is tied with 14 other schools for 13th-highest among national universities in the United States, according to a U.S. News & World Report study released Jan. 19. The average application fee for national universities was $46.78, and only three of the schools reported having no fee. A total of 252 national universities responded to the survey.

But Miller, a senior at Woburn Memorial High School in Massachusetts, said the high application fee didn’t shy him away from applying to SU. He said he has always wanted to apply to SU, one of his top-two college options.

‘I think it’s expensive, but the school can charge whatever they want to make money,’ Miller said.

And Miller isn’t the only one looking past the $70 application fee.

As of Tuesday afternoon, SU’s Office of Admissions had received a record 25,309 first-year applications, said Nancy Rothschild, associate dean of admissions, in an e-mail. This year’s number broke the mark set last year by more than 2,000 applications. Rothschild said the application fee at SU has been $70 since 2008 and hasn’t had an effect on the number of applicants.

‘Over the past two years, we have seen significant increases in the number of applications from a broad cross-section of students,’ she said. ‘Therefore, the amount of the application fee does not appear to discourage interested students from applying for admission.’

To set the application fee, SU looks at its peer institutions, said Don Saleh, vice president for enrollment management, in an e-mail. The application fee is within $5 of most of the university’s competition, he said.

Three of SU’s peer institutions were listed in the study. Boston University’s $75 application fee was tied for third-highest with 10 other schools, according to the study. Northeastern University and Boston College were among the schools tied with SU that had a $70 fee, according to the study.

‘I don’t think that a difference of $5 or $10 makes a difference in the decision that students make,’ Saleh said.

But at West Genesee High School in Camillus, N.Y., application fees do become an issue.

Students who are interested in SU but don’t have the university among their top-three school choices are discouraged from applying, said Kay Merrick, school counselor at West Genesee. But this is just what the university wants, she said.

‘Schools want students to be more serious so they’re not getting 40,000 applications for 5,000 spots,’ Merrick said.

An application fee of $70 makes students consider whether or not the school is one of their top choices, said Laura Bond, school counselor at Jamesville-DeWitt High School in DeWitt, N.Y. At Jamesville-DeWitt, Bond said she has never had a student who could not apply to a school because the fee was too high. However, she has heard concerns.

‘We always hear complaints about the fees being high — but that’s not just at SU,’ Bond said.

Some students at Jamesville-DeWitt apply to a few schools while others apply to 18, she said. Students are spending more than $200 for applications to four or five schools, which is a difficult amount of money to come up with during the current financial times, Bond said.

But in most cases, parents encourage their children to apply to several schools, although students at Jamesville-DeWitt often end up using the money they earned from summer jobs to pay for the application fees, Bond said.

The high cost of private schools and the current economic hardships are also causing students to apply to state schools instead of national universities such as SU, said Merrick, the West Genesee school counselor. Although SU is losing applicants to the State University of New York colleges, Merrick said several of her students are interested in New York private schools.

West Genesee currently has an agreement with Onondaga Community College that allows students to apply for free, Merrick said.

Although SU does not offer a fee waiver based on students’ location, the university does offer one based on prospective students’ financial need.

Rothschild, the associate dean of admissions, said SU honors application fee waiver requests when it will be a hardship for the student and family. During the past three years, 10 to 14 percent of the applicants requested and received fee waivers, she said.

Even though many schools give applicants the option to apply for a fee waiver, Merrick said it still costs too much to apply to college.

Said Merrick: ‘If you’re paying $70, you should be a viable candidate to get in.’

jdharr04@syr.edu

Published on January 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jon: jdharr04@syr.edu