18 People Answer The Question, ‘What Is The Most Unfair Advantage A Person Can Have?’

16. Brianna Ruffin

Having the money to apply to college.

A lot of people waste their time in college. Binge drinking? Whoohoo! Parties? Yay! That’ll totally get you a job after graduation.

Other people use college as a way out. They know that if they diligently focus on their studies (while having fun, of course), they can get a job after graduation and not be forced to live the same lives as their parents or grandparents. They can make something of their lives.

Just the process of applying to college in the United States is different if you have the money to spend on applications.

Let’s say the average application fee is $60. If you applied to six schools, that’d be $360, just for the application fee. Unfortunately, that’s not the only fee you have to pay. There’s standardized testing, too, which is $50 per test date. But, wait. You’re supposed to take both the ACT and SAT, or one test twice. That’s $100. Oh, boy. This is really starting to get expensive. At my high school, you have to pay $2 per school to have your transcript sent out. We were applying to six schools, right? Gosh, darn it. That’s $12! But what about sending your ACT or SAT scores? The first four are free, but the rest are $11 each. Hmm. Guess that’s another $22 down the drain. Let’s see. It just cost us $100 to do all that standardized testing, and another $394 to actually apply to college.

The biggest irony of all is that applying for financial aid costs money, too. The FAFSA is free, but the CSS PROFILE is not. There’s a suspicious $9 processing fee when you fill it out the first time, and actually sending it is $16 per school. Six schools? It’ll cost you $105 just to apply for aid.

Final Scores:

Standardized Testing
$100

Applying to College and For Aid:
$499

Let’s think about the people who actually need to apply to college. Those are going to be lower-income, high-achieving students. If their family makes a low enough income, they can get fee waivers for applications and tests. But what about kids who aren’t eligible for those, but still can’t pay those gosh darn fees? They can’t apply to some schools. I know this doesn’t feel like a great tragedy, and in some cases it’s not. A lot of the top schools offer fee waivers for multicultural students, or don’t require that you pay the application fee if you can’t afford it and don’t have a waiver. (Two schools that come to mind are the University of Chicago and Dartmouth.) At other schools, you’re screwed. My entire college process has been centered around what application fees I could or couldn’t pay. Some schools don’t have a fee for the CommonApp, and I focused on applying to them. At other places I was eligible for waivers that had nothing to do with income. In the end, I had to drop three schools from my college list because of the $60 fee.

When I go to high school, though, these ignorant, stupid kids that don’t really need to go to college anyway say things like, “Oh, I know my parents could pay for NYU.” (One of the most expensive schools in the country. I didn’t even bother to apply because their financial aid program’s less than optimal.) Other kids will say, “Yeah, I applied to 17 schools. I’ve spent, like, $1000 on applications.” Are you an idiot? Do you even know the value of money? You can’t even go to all 17 schools if you get in, yet you’ve wasted so much money just applying there. These are the same kids whose parents went to Brown and whose siblings went to Princeton. They’ve got all the help in the world for their college applications. I, on the other hand, will be a first-generation college student. I probably need to go to college more than these kids do, and I don’t know what I’m doing with my applications and can barely pay for them. Even worse, these kids can afford to pay for these colleges. (The top schools have the best financial aid programs, but they don’t make college free.) The kids who need college, even with one hundred percent of their need met, sometimes still can’t afford it.

The kids who most need to apply to college to better their lives can’t afford to. The kids who don’t need college can just throw money around. (College sounds like fun. Might as well go, right?) That’s the biggest unfair advantage -having the money to better your life when you don’t need it.

17. Annie Fuentes

Genuinely not caring what other people think.