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Colorado's 'Free Application Day' for public and several private universities

Aims to support low-income families and first-generation students
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COLORADO SPRINGS — People can apply to all public colleges and several private universities in Colorado for free until midnight on October 17th.

News5 looked online to see what the cost would be to apply to a few colleges in Colorado. If you apply to CU Boulder, DU and CSU, that adds up to $180.

There were nearly 65,000 college applications during this push last year, according to Colorado's Department of Higher Education.

That's 44% by students of color and more than 1/3 by first-generation students.

This is the seventh year of Colorado's free application days, aiming to also keep students pursuing higher education in state.

Every public four-year university and college has a unique process to wave those application fees. Individual instructions and promo codes can be found here.

"Adding up all the application fees for all the colleges that I wanted to apply to, it's up to $500, so it's going to eliminate that whole cost and also, my family is low income, so we do not have enough money to be spending on those type of things," said Chanell Camacho.

Camacho is a senior at Widefield High School. She's applying to four colleges, which have been impossible without these free application days.

"I would have been applying to, like, maybe one school, and that's about it," said Camacho.

The same goes for Widefield High School senior Morgan Betts, who is applying to six colleges.

"It can kind of get out of hand with the amount of application fees just for colleges to possibly tell you no," said Betts.

Betts is applying to nursing programs across the state.

"The fact that you can have more opportunities to get into a good school that you want to go to without having to spend like 400, $500, it gives you that just more like safety and opportunities," said Betts.

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