Justice May Bust the College Trust The federal government is looking into an ‘ethics code’ designed to shield schools from competition. By Naomi Schaefer Riley
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-may-bust-the-college-trust-1516666229
Are colleges colluding? The U.S. Justice Department wrote the National Association for College Admission Counseling Jan. 10 seeking information on its “ethics code.” The department’s aim is to determine whether colleges, through NACAC, may be violating antitrust law by seeking “to restrain trade among colleges and universities in the recruitment of students.”
It’s long been an open secret that American colleges engage in cartel-like behavior. Schools that are supposed to be wholly independent agree on when students can submit applications, when admissions officers must inform them of a decision (including a financial-aid offer), when students must accept or decline the offer, and when to let students off the waiting list. In response to an earlier Justice Department investigation, Ivy League schools in 1991 agreed to stop sharing information about offers of financial aid.
Colleges argue that this cooperation benefits applicants. Its purpose is “to provide access to college in a way that is transparent, is clear and easy to understand, in a way that parents and school counselors can understand how the process works,” Todd Rinehart, a University of Denver administrator who led the committee that rewrote the code last year, told InsideHigherEd.
Perhaps, but the code also serves to ensure that colleges cannot get an “unfair” advantage over one another. What if one school decided to allow applications before the NACAC-decreed Oct. 15 start date? What if it was so impressed by an application it sent an admission offer the following day? The student would save months of work filling out applications and hundreds of dollars on application fees. But the other colleges would be out of luck.
What about the way colleges agree on what it means to apply “early decision”? Students promise they’ll enroll in a school no matter what other offers come in and risk being blacklisted if they back out. Katharine Fretwell, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, told U.S. News in 2016 her school and about 30 other colleges share lists of students admitted through early decision—and of those who subsequently decided not to attend. CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
