Gary Stocker investigates 40 elite universities that secretly coordinated a financial aid requirement: counting non-custodial parent income even when that parent contributes nothing. Students from divorced families pay an average of $6,200 more per year. Legal filings claim the schools engaged in price-fixing, now before a federal judge.
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This is Gary Stocker. Let's go beyond the college brochure. They were the Golden 40, a group of the most prestigious, most storied, and most expensive universities in these United States of America. Names that carry weight on a resume and a certain prestige at a cocktail party. For years, they had told parents and students the same thing. We use a fair and equitable formula to determine what you can afford to attend our college. They called it the institutional methodology. It sounded scientific. It sounded fair. It sounded just. But there was a specific group of students who noticed, who noticed the math wasn't quite adding up. And these, these were the children of divorce. You see, for decades, the federal government, through the FAFSA, focused on the parent the child actually lived with. But the Golden 40, they wanted more. They required something called the non-custodial parent profile. The non-custodial parent profile. They reached, they reached into the pockets of the parent who wasn't there. The father in another state, the mother who hadn't seen a report card in 5 years or more. And even if that parent refused to pay a single dime toward tuition, the colleges counted that parent's income anyway. The colleges claimed they were just being thorough. They were protecting their financial aid funds. But then the curtain was pulled back. A group of students looked at the data and realized that these 40 schools, these 40 colleges, weren't just following a formula. They were allegedly following each other. They were meeting in secret, or so the legal filings say, to make sure they all required the same information at the same time to keep their tuition prices high. They weren't competing to be the most affordable. They were, as the lawyers now call it, a cartel. Because of this agreement, students from divorced homes found themselves paying on average, an extra $6,200 more every single year than students from traditional non-divorced families. The brochures talked about diversity and inclusion. They talked about meeting 100% of demonstrated need. But beyond the college brochure is that 40 of the wealthiest colleges in the world are now standing before a federal judge accused of a multi-billion-dollar price-fixing scheme that targeted the very families who are already struggling to hold things together. They said it was about fairness. The courts may soon decide otherwise. It was about the bottom line. And now we have gone beyond the college pusher.
