April 15th Passed...No Answer....What Does This Mean???

[Eigen]

The exchange of money does create a business transaction, but from my view, you're framing the business transaction differently than the school sees it. 

 

From the schools side, you're paying a fee to provide for the time and effort involved in reviewing your application. 

 

From your perspective, you're paying a fee to get a status- admitted/rejected- as the result of that review. 

 

A business transaction is shaped entirely by the language you (and the school) agreed to when you payed the fee- it's not fair to tag additional expectations onto that just because you have them, especially when you're imposing a timeline onto it. 

[velua]

The exchange of money does create a business transaction and not giving an answer to the applicant is UNPROFESSIONAL (and unprofessional is a really civil way to put it).   

 

As I see it, it does not matter to the applicant how their fee is ultimately utilized by the institution.  The fee is payed for a yes/no answer, and the argument that the department doesn't receive the fee directly, and therefor not bound to respond in a timely and professional manner, "has nothing to do with the price of the rice". 

 

I also agree that this is a giant red flag when selecting a program to enter, however I am alarmed by the frequency of this behavior by graduate programs (in my case 3 of 6 PhD programs sent no answer).  I have now received notification from 2 of those 3 programs but only after contacting multiple people, multiple times, over a period of 2 weeks.  If this is S.O.P. than revision is required.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous in any situation in life where you pay (a lot of) money for some service and then you have to spend your time to get them to do their job. This is one example, and it reminds me of buying a Super Bowl jersey 2 weeks before the game for some absurd price and then having to constantly email or call them to actually get them to do their job and mail the damn jersey. The one year when I didn't pester NFLshop constantly, they of course had it delivered the day after the Super Bowl.

 

Of course, I'm not saying what the hard deadline should be. That's a different question, but I don't think I got an answer from one place many years ago, and several others I had to ask multiple times to get my answer. Totally unacceptable.

[artsy16]

Admission departments are only one part of a university, and you will never have to deal with them once you're in. I never understood why prospective students judge an entire university from one department that is completely unrelated to academics, research, etc. Admission departments are also notoriously understaffed and usually get record numbers of applications each year.

 

Paying an application fee is a business transaction. You pay money for a product and in this case the product is an admission result. I'm baffled how some posters are saying that giving a decision is not what the universities 'signed up for', so to speak, when you pay your application fee. In no other area of business/commerce would this be acceptable.

Edited May 29, 2015 by artsy16

[velua]

Well I recall looking into Yale's Math Ph.D. program many years ago and their website was horrible. I wrote to the grad admissions person several times for some information and never got a response. That turned me off of even applying to the school. If you can't get a simple response now, there's a good chance you won't get as much support as you might like (whatever that means) once you're in.