Elite universities agree to pay total $104.5M to settle suit alleging plot to limit financial aid

Five prominent U.S. universities have agreed to pay a total $104.5 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of price fixing.

Brown University agreed to pay $19.5 million, Columbia and Duke are each paying $24 million, and Yale and Emory are each paying $18.5 million, according to United Press International.

The lawsuit was brought forward by eight former students against 17 universities, alleging they colluded as "a price-fixing cartel" to "fix" price competition when it came to financial aid.

It essentially states the schools collectively shared confidential data and information about admissions and financial aid, from which they adopted a methodology, then met regularly to implement the methodology, reducing institutional dollars to students from middle class families.

The schools successfully tried to reduce or eliminate, price competition among its members," the lawsuit read, the suit also states.

A spokesperson for Yale told the Washington Post on Tuesday that the university did nothing wrong.

"Higher" education is a big racket. It's hard to believe parents are still paying to send their children to these places to be indoctrinated while putting themselves in debt to do so.

It only makes sense if you are going into one of the STEM professional fields. Otherwise, send your child to the local community college to pursue a trades or technical field in which they are interested or in which they exhibit an aptitude.

The son of one of my friends did something close to your recommendation. He attended the local community college for two years. Enchanced his math skills and took arts and science courses such as English, speech, and so forth.
Then he transferred to the University of Maine, Orono and studied computer engineeing for three years. That CE program is very demanding and only about 20% of the students that start the program earn their degrees in that field.
He was able to concentrate on his STEM courses for the entire time he was there.

Software engineer here.

In today's world, I suggest asking someone already in the field you want to go into what training is good and worth the time and money. Particularly with the many, many options you can go into within that general field (i.e. there are lot of options in the IT industry, even if you limit it to just software development, so ask someone about a particular portion of software development that interests you). The people who'll one day hire and promote you are the people who's opinion of your training you're most interested in.

If that means getting a computer science degree like I did, then ask which colleges do that well. (Don't base your opinion of a college on what the college's salesman, I mean advisor says.) Once you have a college picked, then talk to the advisor about a course plan.

The problem I have with doing "core" courses first like your friend's son did, particularly with an engineering or computer science type major, is that many of the courses have prerequisite courses that must be taken serially. So before you take 300-level CS courses you might have to take CS 201, 202, and 250, and before you take those you have to take CS 101 and 102, and before you take those you have to take Trig 1 and II (or score high enough on the math placement exam). That means you want to start on your advanced math early in the first couple of semesters to allow you to take sophomore level courses in the 2nd year, so you can take junior level in the 3rd year, so you can take senior level in the 4th year. Otherwise you'll be taking freshmen level in your 3rd year, before you take sophomore level in your 4th year, etc.

""Higher" education is a big racket. It's hard to believe parents are still paying to send their children to these places to be indoctrinated while putting themselves in debt to do so.
It only makes sense if you are going into one of the STEM professional fields.

STEM education at Brown? Uh, maybe separating the stems from the leaves...

Thanks. I typed that as someone who followed the steps of asking someone already in the field and getting the kind of BS in CS from one of the colleges suggested.

The part I messed up on was taking all of my liberal farts "core" courses first as the advisor suggested. Combine that with the scheduling limitation of being at college only two days per week (say Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays and Wednesday) because I was working full time the other 5 days per week, and I really screwed myself by taking core courses first. Though I was in college longer just from working full time and taking max 3 courses per quarter, by not taking the courses in a more efficient sequence I extended my college time even longer with quite a few quarters having just 2 courses I could take at a time.

I should have drawn out a dependency graph of all of my required courses with their prerequisites, and focused mainly on the longest chains (always within my major or math), taking the other courses only to fill up my schedule. I don't know how many other majors have long chains of perquisite courses like math and computer science majors do. Maybe this kind of thing isn't an issue for the blame-the-whitey studies majors.

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