More news from the cost-cutting front: a few universities (MIT, Penn, Yale) have decided to do away with the paper rejection letter. They won’t even send an email. Instead, applicants have to check their application status online to find out if they have been accepted or not.
Thankfully, there are policies to send letters to people who do not check their status within a certain time, or for those who do not have access to the Internet.
Like most universities, these three have charge admission fees (MIT: 65$, Penn: unclear…70$?, Yale: 50$). I am assuming that the cost savings from these programs will not be passed on to students. Of course, the admission fees are not only based on covering the actual costs of the applications. The savings would be so small as to be irrelevant to the individual student, but in the aggregate work out to real money for the university.
I think we are going to see years of cost-cutting taking place at universities, and we all need to remain vigilant to ensure that this is done in a way that is sensible, fair, and maintains the overall quality of the academic experience.
Related: McGill’s Administrative Task Force on Dealing with Economic Uncertainty is our administration’s attempt to engage the community to navigate the difficult years ahead. While cynics may brand this as a PR effort, I think it is the right approach and sets the right tone for how we will be moving forward.
