<p>You do know that there are quotas for international student at some schools. Quotas for financial aid, quoatas for how many from each country. I think our State Department even operates on quotas per country and different countries are treated in different ways. I don’t think it is rascism.</p>
<p>OP … if you would tell us the school we likely could be more helpful because we could check out their policies … as it is we have little to no information to see how they wronged you specifically</p>
<p>Most likely they treat internationals differently depending on the county of origin. Perhaps they ask for ISFAA for students from a specific set of countries, and CSS from others. Perhaps as teachandmom suggested, they offer a set number of waivers for different countries. Those waivers each have a individual code, and they don’t run the CSS profile, so they probably end up paying the cost of each of those fee waivers.</p>
<p>If you have a fee waiver from another school, you may find the cost is not as much as you think. The initial $25 is paid once for the first school (or waived), and the $16 is per additional school. Have you actually sent the CSS profile to any schools? I hope this doesn’t sound insensitive, but if you’ve gotten waivers from most of the schools, will it really be that difficult to come up with $16 for this one school? It’s one thing to ask for an application fee waiver - it doesn’t really cost them anything, but with a CSS fee waiver, they are accountable for those fees (they don’t run CSS, the College Board does). If you were a US citizen, with low income, you might qualify for automatic fee waivers, but that only covers up to 6 schools, and it sounds to me like you’re applying to more than that. Keep in mind there will always be costs creeping up on you, that you will need to cover through your time in the US. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but this is part of the cost of trying to attend college in the US.</p>
<p>Since other schools have offered fee waivers, or accepted other forms, I’m sure you understand that most ask your nationality. It’s just that in the case of the other schools they had waivers available to offer. My D got a fee waiver from one school, after she attended a multicultural open house. Each waiver has an individual code, and can be used once (each student was given a different code). They have to obtain those codes from the College Board, they don’t generate them themselves. So I’m sure they have a limited number, and as a private institution, they are entitled to decide how to use them.</p>
<p>The school in question has need blind admissions (the admissions committee doesn’t even know if you’re applying for finaid when they make their decision) and roughly half of admitted international students come from this student’s part of the world, so whatever’s going on with the fee waiver request I can’t imagine it has anything to do with the applicant’s race.</p>
<p>Why so secretive on the school in question & the home country of OP?</p>
<p>The student can divulge that if s/he choose to, but it’s not my place to post someone else’s private information.</p>
<p>The school that may or may not acts unfairly to a particular country’s students.</p>
<p>This kind of information is private information?</p>
<p>Where this particular student is applying is private, and particularly after hinting that the school’s admissions personnel may be racist I can see why s/he might not want the name disclosed in a thread associated with his/her screen name.</p>
<p>I don’t think we need to know the college. Doesn’t matter. It does concern me when students get irate about not receiving a fee waiver with a value less than $20 given the costs of college, travel, books, supplies, etc. especially coming from another country.</p>
<p>I am not throwing tantrums on a public forum because I am stubborn and want 16 dollars. I also realize that it’s not the institute’s responsibility to attend to my grievances. My family’s financial problems are temporary. Even though I am a low income student, under normal circumstances I would have been able to afford this.</p>
<p>I was simply shocked because it totally seemed like racism at first(read OP+example), but now that I have read the opinions of so many people, I don’t really think it was racism. Even if it was by some remote chance, I can’t prove it or do anything. The institute gives full rides to so many internationals, some of which are from my country, so I really don’t think they have any reason to be racist to some random guy like me. I particularly agree with what dodgersmom said.</p>
<p>I have applied for CSS waivers to other schools, and am waiting for their response. Depending on how it turns out, I’ll borrow the amount required for the CSS profile(borrow 25 dollars, sounds hilarious but that’s how my situation is currently) and see how things go. Hopefully my financial situation will improve in the coming weeks as well.
Again, I was only asking if their behavior would qualify as racist because I was unsure of their reasons, I DON’T think they are racist because of the multiple reasons stated above.</p>
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Easy enough to find out. Just check the OP’s posting history.</p>
<p>Thankfully, the name of the college isn’t there as I’ve changed my mind a million times. So people, don’t randomly try and guess the name of the college. Obviously, you won’t get it right, but you might incorrectly assume it to be some wrong college which I may not have even applied to and you might start slinging mud at it for no reason. As this forum is a resource for future applicants, please refrain from unintentionally defaming colleges for no reason and discouraging future applicants.</p>
<p>But your post was extremely unkind and unwarranted. You have no right to divulge my personal information or direct people to it by any means. And that wasn’t the point of the discussion.
Further, I think we have all arrived at the conclusion that this issue had more to do with institutional policy.
I’d like to re-iterate that I haven’t accused anyone of racism, I was only trying to figure out whether it WAS racism in the first place.</p>
<p>From what I read here, there were schools that waived your fee. What makes your situation any different from parents of students who are not fee waiver eligible? You have to pick and choose. At $50-75 a pop, there have been many conversations in every family limiting the number of schools that a student can apply to because the money adds up quickly. At the end of the day, no school owes you a fee waiver. </p>
<p>However, in response to your original question; no, the school was not being racist toward you in asking you your country of origin as some colleges are need blind to mexican and canadian citizens. Perhaps the school asked you your country of origin because they will waive fees for those students while not waiving fees for other international students. You have asked this question a number of times in different forms including the international forum b@r!um (who gives excellent advice for international students) told you what you qualify and do not qualify for.</p>
<p>“At the end of the day, no school owes you a fee waiver.”
I know that. I’m not holding anyone at gunpoint or demanding fee waivers. I’ve said that before. I’m paying as much as I possibly can and managing my finances as well as I can while trying to get admission somewhere. I dropped a bunch of colleges simply because I couldn’t pay for their app fees/sat score reports/css forms etc at this time of the year. My family, like any other indigent family, has had its share of discussions.
“You have asked this question a number of times”
I have no idea what question are you referring to. I have discussed fee waivers, financial documents and procedures with numerous people on CC, including you, b@r!um, dodgersmom, who have been very helpful and I have no idea what that has to do with the issue at hand. Plus, I’ve only posted questions twice in different forums to get the responses of people who reply exclusively to threads in those particular forums. People who have posted before you and know my situation in depth have already said that this university doesn’t distinguish between different types of non-resident aliens.</p>
<p>But the school decided not to give you a fee waiver. They are totally in their right to deny you or anyone else. An application/financial fee waiver is just the tip of the iceberg. What are you going to do when it comes to sending scores, coming up with your student contribution, plane tickets and other sundry cost involved in applying to and attending college?</p>
<p>Like I said, my situation is temporary. I wouldn’t work for 3 years if I couldn’t afford a plane ticket. I never said that they couldn’t deny me anything. They can even throw my file in the bin right now, though thankfully the school’s name is still unknown.
I know about the expenses involved and I explicitly said I don’t want a sermon on that.
All the answers to my questions and everyone else’s are in the previous posts and this discussion is pretty much complete. I think we’ve all arrived at the conclusion that there was no racism involved. I’ve repeated myself and explained enough. I’ll just stop posting before this thread gets featured or something.</p>
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<p>All users need to be aware, though, in posting on CC, that the more knowledgeable members of the forum will look at the user’s past posts to “fill in the gaps.” So, a user’s anonymity is guaranteed only to the extent the the user himself (or herself) has protected that anonymity on ALL posts, not just the current one.</p>
<p>If any user is concerned about the revealing details that were included in a past post, you should contact a moderator to see if those details can be removed. (Find the troublesome post, click on “report problem post,” and then point out the details you’d like to have removed.) I don’t if the moderators would accommodate such a request or not . . . so it’s better to be discreet in the first place.</p>
<p>And, by the way, no worries about mud-slinging at the unnamed college. As you say, I think we’ve all agreed that the college didn’t deliberately do anything wrong.</p>
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<p>Maybe the OP’s choice of word is too strong?</p>
<p>I rather doubt that any of the more experienced participants on this forum think the college did anything wrong at all. Rather, it was the OP who seems to have overreacted. No problem, though, in keeping the college name out of it to protect the OP’s privacy.</p>
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<p>Good luck.</p>