Fee for Recommendation letters?

Question

My college demands a fee (equivalent to $10) from the students for every LOR that the student asks for. The fee goes to the college authorities and not to the professors themselves.

Is this a malpractice? I already wrote a complaint to principal/dean and he said that this is how it works.

What can I do about it, even my fellow classmates are exhausted paying so many fees since we are all applying to multiple colleges for admissions to future courses?

EDIT: I asked my dean based on the suggestion of the answer below (by Maarten Buis) and the reply stated that this is indeed an act to limit the applications that a student makes, so that the professors aren't burdened to write recommendations for students who apply to various institutions just for the sake of it/ a place where the said student would have no chance but still applies.

Answer 1

Malpractice has legal meaning that does not seem to apply here. So I will interpret your question as "is this wrong". After all, this is not the place to get legal advice.

Given the information you have given us, this seems to be a policy by the institution, and not one that professor invented themself, nor does that professor benefit from it. So the professor is not doing anything wrong. Professors are powerful, but even they have to bow to university policy.

There are possible justifications for such a fee. The time spent on writing such a letter is time that cannot be spent on other things, so there is a real cost the institution incurs for giving the student that service. However, given the small size of the fee, this sounds more to me like a policy to put up a small barrier to prevent overuse rather than a policy to get some money. Maybe, this was a reaction to too many students asking too many LORs. Maybe something like: lets ask all faculty members to write a LOR, and I will pick the two best ones. If many students do that, then the university needs to react, for example adding a small fee. I don't know if this applies to your university, but there are situations where such a fee may be justified.

That is the real answer I can give you: find out why they have that policy. It is hard to argue against a policy if you don't know why it is there. Maybe, they actually had a good reason, and you don't want to argue against it anymore. That would also be a good outcome.

Answer 2

The policy at face seems perfectly reasonable to prevent some Tragedy of the Commons, though in modern times, professors have been largely free to write or reject per-student (ie. why would they write a letter for a student who they are sure does not understand a subject to work with their peers? or why would they not write a letter for a promising student who added to their class? - surely they must be free to write or not write for either case if asked!)

However, without strong controls I believe this leads to some trouble-
The monetary fee is insignificant in comparison to the cost of attendance, but the process provides a novel way for the university to directly track some details of the process surrounding letters of recommendation.

Simply the knowledge that different counts of LOR are sent by professors could affect them personally (are they sending enough? too many?) or worse, financial information and speculative success information about students involved is no business of the university. (ie. is 15 letters too many? cheaper than a US physics text!)

Conversely (perhaps?), whether the payment is accepted shows information to a student whether a professor did write a LOR, while this information may not otherwise be known. (is this desirable? it's a break from the norm, but perhaps not a bad one)