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Multiple Elite Universities Sued for Allegedly Inflating Prices for Financial Aid Recipients

Multiple Elite Universities Sued for Allegedly Inflating Prices for Financial Aid Recipients

“seeks to compensate people who received financial aid packages that did not fully cover the cost of tuition, room and board”

Maybe we should just do away with financial aid. Wouldn’t that solve a lot of problems?

NBC News reports:

16 Ivy League and elite universities sued for alleged financial aid conspiracy

Sixteen Ivy League and elite U.S. universities were sued in federal court for allegedly illegally conspiring to eliminate competitive financial aid offers to students in a price fixing scheme.

The suit alleges the conspiracy artificially inflated the cost of attendance for all students receiving financial aid and resulted in the overcharging of “over 170,000 financial-aid recipients by at least hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The demand for a class action jury trial, filed on Sunday in an Illinois federal court by five former Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Duke University students, seeks to compensate people who received financial aid packages that did not fully cover the cost of tuition, room and board from one of the 16 self-described “need-blind” universities since 2003.

The crux of the suit hinges on part of a 1994 federal education law called “Section 568,” an exemption from antitrust laws for colleges and universities that ostensibly don’t consider an applicant’s financial status while deciding admission, known as need-blind admission. This exemption allows need-blind colleges and universities to ignore century-old antitrust laws and collaborate with their competitors.

The lawsuit names Brown University, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, Vanderbilt University and Yale University as defendants.

Spokespeople for Dartmouth College, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Chicago, Cornell, Notre Dame, Emory, Northwestern, Duke and Rice declined to comment on pending litigation.

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Comments

The Gentle Grizzly | January 11, 2022 at 1:32 pm

Stop the student loan fiasco and tuition would be 1/3 what it is now.

    Yes, the “discount” rate at most colleges runs about 50%, so stopping student loans would drop tuition to about 1/2 of what it is now.

    If you want to improve the colleges as well as dropping the tuition rate further (probably to 1/3, as the Grizz suggests), you need to fire the DEI political commisars and terminate the grievance departments: Gender studies, Afro, Queer studies, ethnic studies.

Stupid American voters don’t understand that when the government subsidizes something the price goes up to absorb the subsidy.

Thirteen years ago, the government paid every citizen a “rebate” of $40 per box for purchasing up to two digital TV converter boxes, a device profitably priced at the $10-$20 range depending on quality. The price of the boxes immediately rose to $45-$60. After the rebates sunsetted, guess what the boxes were priced at.

Doesn’t something similar happen when you have a good health insurance plan?

    henrybowman in reply to alohahola. | January 12, 2022 at 8:19 am

    And also when you have a personal liability umbrella policy. Got policy? Sue him for the policy limit. Otherwise, why bother, blood from a stone.