Ivies concerned over future aid

The financial aid that the University and other Ivy League schools offer will no longer be distributed as fairly to those in need, according to administrators at several Ivy League institutions. This comes after the Ivy Overlap Group's recent aquiescence to a Justice Department demand that it cease its annual meeting on aid and tuition. "The function of the Overlap meeting in the past was to make each institution have the best information available for estimating the need of each student," said President Sheldon Hackney last Friday. "Without it, some institutions will be offering financial aid in excess of each individual's need." "I think it's a danger that some awards will be less accurate than they had been," said Cornell University's Director of Financial Aid Don Saleh. Justice Department officials stress however, that their decision was not intended to decrease the effectiveness of financial aid awards, but to ensure compliance with federal anti-trust laws to promote price competition within the League, thereby decreasing tuition. "It was a conspiracy to fix the amount of money that families pay to attend a school," said Department spokesperson Gina Talamona. "So basically the cartel denied the family's right to compare prices among the schools." Hackney said the federal agency's claim that universities should be bound by the same anti-trust laws that govern businesses was unfounded, and that students will ultimately suffer because of it. "The Justice Department said we ought to be competing in price with other institutions," he said. "We like to compete in quality." Princeton University's Vice President and Secretary Thomas Wright agreed, saying that the annual meetings served an important function. "There [will be] less exchange of information," he said. "There is no question that [the meetings] increased the accuracy of the information on which the [aid] decisions were based. Some of us fear and suspect over time the consent decree will have a significant effect." But Wright added this week that the decision could be overturned if schools press for "legislative relief," by lobbying Congress to stipulate in law that the allocation of financial aid is not subject to anti-trust laws. Administrators at several universities, including the University's provost Michael Aiken, said this was an option that was being considered. "We must now look to the Congress to recognize the importance of allowing colleges to cooperate in maintaining need-based financial aid programs," said a statement released earlier this week by Columbia University. "And we will seek appropriate legislative action to permit such cooperation." Hackney also said that the move may make rising college freshmen inclined to choose their university based on which has the lowest tuition, rather than which would be their best match, as has been encouraged in the past. "We wanted students to choose their university on some other basis than price," he said. "[The decision] may result in less happy students, and maybe less well-educated ones." And Hackney said he fears that without the past system of aid distribution, the numbers of financially disadvantaged students in universities may be decreased. "The Justice Department system clearly heads in a direction we had wanted to avoid," he added. "It would threaten economic diversity." But other Ivy administrators said that unlike the University, economic diversity will not be threatened at their schools, even though the tuition may rise. "I don't look for it to change anything that we were already doing," said Thomas Soybel, Dartmouth College's assistant college counsel. "Dartmouth has indicated that it will continue to award financial aid on the basis of need." Hackney said that going into litigation against the government "just wasn't worth it," as the University had already spent $400,000 in the two-year process to collect the information which was used in the investigation. He predicted litigation "would have taken two or three years." Other Ivy Group administrators said their schools spent similar amounts to supply the information in compliance with the Justice Department probe, ranging from Brown's expenditure of $250,000 to Princeton's outlay of $750,000. And Soybel said despite the Group's "strong" case, going into court against the government could have been a gamble. "Litigation is always a risk," he said. "With a jury trial, either side can win." Several of the administrators said they are relieved that the investigation has ended. "We did reluctantly decide to sign the consent agreement," Hackney told the Executive Committee of the University Trustees last week. "The process is finally over."

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