Was I ripped off by the graduate school admissions committee at a top 10 university?
Having no idea which university you applied to or what their policies are, my guess is that no, you are not entitled to a refund. The application fee is not refunded to rejected applicants. “Ripped off” is a bit of a… loaded term? It’s $100, not your life’s savings (I hope!), and generally speaking the admissions consideration fee is meant as a way to discourage frivolous applications; you’re not buying something, you’re basically just proving that you aren’t carpet-bombing schools with applications when you aren’t qualified. You should have waved good-bye to the C-note when you applied. Some thoughts about the other points you raise: 1) I wouldn’t continue to try to contact the admissions people; it’s unlikely to accomplish much more than elevating your frustration and wasting your time. It’s also quite possible that you haven’t given the recipients of your emails enough time to address them. I can’t tell from the information in your post, but giving it a few days may get you some a
If it’s a top 10 program, do they take applications that late? I’m in the humanities, so things may well be different, but my program (at a flagship state university) accepts students only for the fall, and our application deadline is January 2. If a student applies to our program more than a week or two after that, the graduate school classifies their application as one for the subsequent fall–i.e. an application received in February 2009 would be put in the September 2010 application pool. We don’t even see it if we search for September 2009 applicants in the online admission system. Is there any chance this has happened to you? If so, you might ask whether your application could be reconsidered in next year’s admissions round. Even if you met the deadline, you might still point out the discrepancy between your transcripts and what you were told, and ask whether your application could be considered again in the next admissions round. If I were you, I would have checked in earlier. Y
You know, I don’t actually feel that 5 undergrad math courses is all that many for a top 10 masters program in CS. Maybe you were rejected for having inadequate mathematical background and the director of the program misspoke in his email and said that you hadn’t taken any math courses. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you didn’t receive a fair evaluation, just that directors of graduate programs are very busy and sometimes make mistakes in the many emails they send out each day. I have to take issue with the way you handled the situation. Firstly, as pointed out above, you should have checked in with how your application was doing way before the weekend before the term began. These things are decided months in advance and you would have had a better chance of correcting things, if a mistake had been made. Second, having suddenly been roused to action, you emailed three different people at once and seemed to have rapidly become an annoyance. Finally, am not sure why you thought this
I actually do think you’re entitled to a refund, but I don’t believe you’ll get it. Those saying you should move on are probably right; those saying that your paying the $100 fee didn’t obligate the school to follow through on their end are incorrect (in terms of ethics, not in terms of the reality of academic admissions). Someone screwed up. There’s no good way to know whether it was a technical glitch (like, say, the application review tool on the website malfunctioned), or a clerical error (a staff member in the admissions office misplaced or incorrectly entered your transcript information), or an admissions faculty member’s error (they simply overlooked the material in your application). This error cost you the opportunity to be accepted or rejected based on the actual merits of your application; the process for which you paid a $100 fee was not completed due to the fault of the admissions office, not you. If you really want to pursue this, you need a sympathetic ear in the admissi
I think there are no good reasons to accuse the department of acting in a “shady fashion” here, nor any possible cause for taking them to court, nor really much to be gained by raising a stink. Graduate admissions are rarely handled (except pro forma, at the end) by any entity outside of a department — there is no admissions office involved, unless it’s a huge program. Dollars to donuts the director mixed you up with someone else, or was talking out his ass. Application fees don’t make any money for anyone. They discourage spurious applications. I spend at least an hour on each serious application to my own grad program, and we’ll discuss the top 20 or so for many hours in committee. Adding in the time spent processing your application, handling your phone calls, meeting you when you visit campus (if you do), etc., $100 doesn’t begin to cover the cost of reviewing an application. Just to give you a sense of the scale of these things: for our humanities department at a major university
