I started saving for PhD admissions 2nd year of Uni. I aimed for the top 10 schools, which meant I needed ~$1200. I skipped meals and other essentials to do this, hoping it would pay off. No one should have to go through this, or limit application numbers due to it.
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When I was advertising for PhD students at Cambridge I set up a shadow application system because I felt charging £65 was unjustified when most applications would not make it past initial filtering. It was a waste of my time and I prefer UCLs approach of not charging (for PhD)
This was especially a problem because the funding I had obtained was specifically earmarked for students from less developed countries. For many of them I doubt it would be easy to get a credit card that works with the payment system, let alone find the money to fund it