Why would a school prevent reapplying after declining an offer of admission?

Question

I am currently applying for a mid-range private school that teaches the career I want primarily (software engineering) and a prestigious public school for computer science (it doesn't have software engineering). So if I make it into the public university, I would evaluate between the specific career of the private one and the economic help of the public one, and choose the most appropriate one.

However, reading their entrance rules, I saw that if I decline the offer of admission in the public one, I could not apply to it again for the next two admission cycles (at two per year, that means a year and a half). What is the philosophy behind this? Applying to several schools benefits students, giving them more schools to choose from. And it also raises the funding because of the payment that is done to give the entrance exam (which is not one of the things public schools in my country can brag about). And it doesn't harm anyone, because the next one in the list would enter. The only collateral damage I can think of is extra administrative effort, but a year and a half vetted from applying to the university because of that seems too much for me. So, why? Is there some extra side effect that they are accounting for?

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The information @Pete L. Clark requested: I am living in Peru, and here the admission process in public universities is pretty simple: You just present your legal and education papers, pay for the entrace exam, take it, and see if you are admitted or not. So, everything boils down to that 3-days exam. But once it is finished, you are in.

Answer 1

I believe the issue here is that if a student has already been offered admission and turned it down, then the school has already given that student due consideration in reviewing the application. Reapplying in the following year means that the candidate was apparently unsatisfied with any of the offers of admission received, which included the school in question. So what would have changed in such a short period of time that meant the offer wasn't good enough then, but is good enough now?

Answer 2

Programs don't like to be used as a "backup", because offers to people using them in this way delay offers to others, sometimes to the point that the other people give up and accept offers from yet-other places. Thus, making offers that fail tends to degrade the quality of candidates who will accept offers. Thus, since you declined once, obviously chances are good that you'd decline again, thus again somewhat-lowering the quality of candidates that will be made an offer early enough to accept.

Answer 3

I guess whether backup applications (and re-applications next time) are or are not a problem depends very much on how many prospective students do how many backup applications.

No problem if a small percentage of prospective students apply for one other university.

But if lots of the people who want to study apply at several places, you end up in a situation where the administrative part of the whole process runs into chaos because one or two more rounds acceptance letters and waiting whether the student accepts are needed. And of course, the chances that a student who ended up on the waiting list with you accepted somewhere else or meanwhile took a job because they thought it unlikely to get a place to study would be high. Thus, administration has a lot of additional work and also stress. You cannot start the application process too early (e.g. the final exam of the schools is needed). But you need to allow a reasonable amount of time for the student to accept or decline the offer of the univerity and students will tend to send the refusal late (or forget to send it at all) because they wait for acceptance of another university. If you are too late sending out the acceptance (for those on the waiting list), this is anywhere between stressful and impossible for the students to accept: they have to find housing and move, and if courses already started they also have to catch up with the learning.
Also, universities cannot overbook like airlines.

In other words, the situation becomes highly stressful for everyone involved:

• the university has a high unnecessary workload (n "backup exams" have to be graded for each student),
• university administration also has a high workload and pressure: they need to react immediately on the refusal letters of the students and may need several rounds of acceptance.
• Students who do not get accepted immedately at the university of their dreams have to stay ready for moving immeditaly without knowing where. Also the prospective student may "hang in the air" because they don't apply for a "regular" job / training while there is still a substantial chance of getting a late acceptance.

I'm wondering whether the fact that you have to pay for the exam is just another symptom of this same problem (or the univiersities' fear of that): both rules may be designed to keep down the number of backup applications.

There are other ways to try avoiding this administrative mess: In my country (Germany) the most overrun fields of study have a central application: you file your one appliation including a statement of backup universities (and backup subjects) and then get an offer according to this. If you end up at a university that was not your first choice, you can anyways start there and try to change later on.
Nevertheless, the last letters of acceptance are usually sent out when the semester has already started (to fill in places of students who accepted but didn't show up or because this is round 3 of the acceptance: the student on the waiting list declined).