I don’t like paying for postage very much when it comes to this college admissions business, just because I’m already preparing myself to fork over tens and tens of thousands if I matriculate somewhere. It doesn’t cost very much to mail return postcards. I don’t know what the dollar cost of printing off little inserts is–I know that the little mini-packets given out at this past college fair cost less than 15 cents in most circumstances. The school (unnamed!) which cited that 15 cent figure included return prepaid info-cards to request more information. And yet Tufts, a school with I would imagine a larger marketing budget (for they certainly had fancier viewbooks), wants me to pay postage. That’s fine with me–it’s just a little bothersome, though luckily I have the appropriate stamps already.

But what about the economically disadvantaged? For them, adding postage costs to their normal expenses is just another hurdle between them and a college education…then again, NPR was reporting last week that costs to market to individual students can swell to thousands of dollars. So maybe I shouldn’t mind the lack of prepaid postage on that little parcel. More than anything else, it just means that far fewer people are going to send them in.

I would have said something about this to the Tufts officer who was at the college fair, Matthew S. Hyde, but I did not realize until I looked at my materials later. I’m sure there is a good explanation for this all, and I’m just overanalyzing a single little piece of paper, but it does lead me to wonder what the general protocol is? I couldn’t remember ever getting anything else which asked me to pay postage.

“Postage waivers” don’t work because you would have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to get them.

Any ideas on how to save more poor people the cost of postage? Does my paying postage subsidize postage for others, special pre-postage paid mailers distributed to low income areas?