Word: overlaps
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...charge more than $15,000 in tuition, room board and fees a year--plan tuition raises together, often before such financial information is publicly available; the same schools jointly raise tuitions frequently to harvest the prestige tied to expense; a group of 23 elite Northeastern colleges known as the "Overlap" group meets annually to set undergraduate financial aid packages; and, finally those willing to comment say such practices are done publicly with the assumption that agreements avoid "unethical bidding wars" for top students. They argue that the schools thus can spread around financial aid money to the most needy, mitigate...
Unfortunately, it's too much even to take the universities' ethical claim of avoiding a "bidding war" at face value. First use common sense. When setting financial aid packages together, the overlap group of schools is plainly more likely to decide on a lower award, not a higher one. The whole point of meeting is of course to save money...
...there is another, troubling implication of the universities' practices and their defense of them. Who decides that education of a particular kind is of equal value and should not be bid for? Here is where arrogance comes in. Somehow the 23 members of the overlap group--the Northeastern elite colleges and universities--have already decided who makes up the top level of education, and how much that top education should cost. Do they then have the right to exclude other educators from their cozy arrangment? Do the 60-plus schools under investigation not become the "education establishment...
Steiner said the admissions information was primarily shared among a group of Northeastern colleges that were already exchanging information about admissions and financial aid. He said those institutions--eight Ivy League and several other New England colleges--had publicly participated in two so-called overlap groups...
Officials at several of the schools included in the Overlap Group say tuition would be even higher than the $18,000 charged by some for tuition, room and board if bidding wars were being waged to obtain students who needed financial help...