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 conspiracySixteen 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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