Excellent post.
You - the applicant - are, more than ever, a customer. A customer of an increasingly overpriced, increasingly commodified product that seeks to serve you in an increasingly competitive job market where jobs are shrinking faster than most realize. You have more power than you may realize, at least before school.
One last note - veteran's status will do much more for your job prospects in Washington DC - to include private contractors - than an IR degree from Georgetown, SAIS, or Fletcher. Federal jobs have nearly dried up entirely for non-veterans and most private contractors place heavy emphasis on hiring veterans because those companies with veteran employees are given preferential treatment for winning government contracts (also women, minority, veteran, service-disabled owned companies).
I graduated from a top IR program in 2015, and before that was an anxiety-ridden gradcafe poster under another handle (trying to retain a little anonymity here).
Scrolling through these anxious posts on a lazy Saturday morning, I want to assure that it's not as hard to get into these programs as many gradcafe posters seem to think.
I had a solid GRE, mediocre GPA, decent but not exceptional work experience. I worked hard on my essays and two of my professional recommendation letter writers definitely liked me a lot (although I never saw their letters), but I was a number of years out of undergrad and the academic reference I got was from a professor in a totally unrelated field who probably barely remembered who I was. I had never had a proper IR job, had never lived in DC. It was a mixed application. But it got me into Johns Hopkins SAIS with a hefty scholarship, and a number of other top programs most of which gave me money.
This is not Yale Law. You don't need a 3.96 GPA from an elite undergrad and a 98th percentile GRE/LSAT. One of my good friends at SAIS once casually referenced being happy about having cracked the 50th percentile on the math portion of the GRE. I have a number of friends that came from no-name undergrads (and of course some from Princeton, Vanderbilt, Middlebury, Boston College, Brown, etc.).
If you're looking for $$$, then you probably want to pump up your GRE scores and write the best letters you possibly can.
ETA: Most gradcafe-ers are probably some of the top applicants to these schools. That's why when results season comes around, you'll see lots of posts like "I can't believe I got into X school with Y dollars!"
