Gone are the days, when a budding genius from the slums could dream of becoming a Nobel laureate, by putting in hours of hard work in study under the street lamp when the world around him is fast asleep. Education no longer comes to those who have only a penchant for learning. You need to have your pockets full too to pursue it. …That might sound too hypothetical. Let’s take the example of our neighborhood high school and college students. Even their parents are finding it difficult to finance their education. Well, after this recession, when they are already not very comfortable in running the household, how can they think of giving good education to their children, especially when it has become very costly?

If you think only the course fees are high, you are in for a not so pleasant surprise! Even the application forms cost more than before. Earlier it was around $10 to $100m, but now an application form costs much more. An application form for admission in Columbia University is not $70b but $75. Most colleges have hiked the cost of the application form by 5%.

Not only application forms, even the exam fees of certain common entrance exams are quite high. The fee of $ 45 for the SAT exam is pretty high, isn’t it? If only one entrance exam costs this much, then consider the amount of money in total that parents have to cough up when their children write many competitive exams. Children can’t really help that, can they? Times have become so competitive, that they’ve got to write a lot of entrance examinations to place themselves in good colleges and good careers. Well, individually all these fees might not look big, but when you add them up, they really do make a big difference.

A common application form which is accepted by more than 150 colleges comes to the rescue of students. You just need to submit only one online application and it is accepted by all the colleges. Apart from saving costs, you save upon a lot of time too which you’d have wasted by filling in dozens of application forms for entrance examinations and admissions. Application forms of conservatories, i.e. music schools cost the highest today. Julliard School and Mannes College all sell their application forms at $100 each. Why does an admission form of Conservatories cost more than that of normal liberal schools? This, they say, is because the admission procedure involves a rigorous review in which an audition test is conducted for the applicant.

Next, the Ivy League Colleges top the list of institutions that charge high application fees. Columbia University, Yale University and Princeton University all charge fee from $65 to $75. Once again review and elaborate processing costs seem to be the reasons behind the high fee. But most Ivy League colleges are ready to offer the application forms at a lower cost for those with low income and large family size.

The other educational institutions that charge high fees are Women’s Colleges, State Schools and Military schools in that order.