Application fees may seem small but they add up and mean real money for some schools.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

For many colleges, application fees mean revenue

August officially kicks off college application season. Rising high school seniors will begin inking their essays and submitting their grades and test scores to more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities.

Next month, many students begin using the Common Application — an undergraduate admissions application that students may use to apply to any of its 625 members.

For some colleges, application fees have become a steadily growing stream of additional revenue.

Take Penn State University, where the application fee is $50. With 53,472 undergraduate applicants each year, the school reels in hundreds of thousands of dollars in application fee revenue. (For students who are financially eligible, their fees are waived.)

It’s not alone. At UCLA, which receives more applications than any college in the U.S., more than 90,000 undergraduate applications flood the system — although only about 20 percent get admitted and only one-third of those actually enroll. So UCLA generates millions of dollars from its applicants, many of whom pay the $70 fee but do not enroll.

The business of college applications is complicated. Schools argue that it takes a lot of time and technology to sort through that avalanche of submissions. In fall 2015, about 20 million students attended American colleges and universities, an increase of 4.9 million since 2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

And, consultants who advise applicants note, students and families eager to have good choices rarely quibble over an extra $10 here or $80 there to play the will-they-take-me game. Many schools, like Penn State, have systems to waive fees for those who can’t afford them or perhaps for those who show up early, have good grades and actually walk the dorms and the quad.