Enrollment deposits.
This is the fee, often hundreds or even thousands of dollars, that students are required to pay, usually within a matter of weeks, to secure their spot after being admitted to an undergraduate or graduate program. In theory, it’s a simple tool to help universities confirm their incoming class. In practice, it’s a barrier that appears late in the process, at the exact moment when they are expected to make a life-changing decision.
The challenge is that students often don’t know these deposits exist until after they’ve been accepted. In a new study, “Hidden Costs, Obvious Consequences: Enrollment Deposits and Access to (Graduate) Higher Education”, Leadership Brainery examined colleges and universities across Massachusetts, we found a consistent pattern: many programs require enrollment deposits, yet many do not disclose this expectation on their websites. That means students are making decisions about where to enroll without fully understanding the true cost of saying “yes.”
As seen in the graph below (an excerpt from the full report), there is a transparency gap across nearly every degree program, including undergraduate programs. For instance, for Master of Business programs in this study, every single program required an enrollment deposit, yet only 20% of them disclosed a deposit requirement on their website (“Advertised Deposit Rate”).
Even when deposits are disclosed, the amounts can be significant. As seen in the second graph below, for undergraduate students, deposits typically fall in the low hundreds. For certain graduate and professional programs (MBA degrees), deposits can exceed $1,000 on average and reach as high as $3,000. Approximately one in three Americans are unlikely to afford an unexpected $400 expense, and over half of young adults ages 18 to 29 report that they likely could not cover such a cost.
For many students, that is rent, groceries, or a month’s worth of basic living expenses. So when a candidate is admitted to multiple programs, they may be forced to choose not based on fit, opportunity, or long-term outcomes, but based on which school they can afford to commit to immediately. In some cases, they may not be able to commit at all.
