sushforgmat wrote:
hastee wrote:
I received emails regarding a round 1 and round 2 application fee waiver.
I noticed that fee waivers are not discussed often among different applicant forums, clearadmit, or reddit. Are these fee waivers an easy way for the university to increase the denominator in their acceptance rate calculation? I received waivers from Fuqua, Tepper, Kenan-Flagler, Owen, and Goizueta. I’m unsure if the waiver is an indication of strong candidacy, or if the adcoms are simply forecasting a lower number of organic applicants and would like to increase that number by sacrificing the fee revenue
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Hey
hasteeWould you mind sharing how you got the fee waivers for Kenan-Flagler, and Owen? I could not find specific requirements on either of the websites.
Hi,
Specific requirements for application fee waivers are not publicized by the universities. All of the programs that received my GMAT score eventually emailed me with a waiver, except for Tepper. When I submitted my Tepper application for round 2, the fee said “waived” but they had never notified me that I qualified for a waiver.
The policies for fee waivers seem to be different at each school. In addition, schools strive to keep these policies rather veiled. You can imagine a certain candidates may be offended to learn that other candidates received waivers, while some did not.
I believe fee waivers are being used this year because of the declining trend in the number of applications year-over-year. The number of applications and the resulting acceptance rate are very well publicized. These metrics can be perceived as indicators of the program’s quality and prestige. So, if the program directors have a feeling that applications may be down, they seem to be willing to extend fee waivers to increase the number of incoming applications. The loss of revenue would be considered minimal in comparison to the perceived decline in quality if applications were to drop significantly.
Thus, an application fee waiver does not necessarily mean the candidate is in a strong position to be accepted.
Just my thoughts - does that help? Does it make me sound like a conspiracy theorist??
Edit- I scored 730 on the gmat. 3.0 GPA