Subpoena follows student journalist’s investigation into bloat at Brown
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, seeking documents related to rising tuition costs following a student journalist’s investigation.
Brown and Penn have engaged in perfect price discrimination by tailoring financial aid offers to maximize revenue from each student, a news release from the committee states.
Committee Chairmen Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald sent letters to the universities’ presidents requesting the schools produce relevant documents by July 22.
The documents are “necessary for the Committee’s oversight of the adequacy of existing antitrust laws as they relate to institutions of higher education,” the chairmen wrote.
The chairmen initially requested the documents on April 8. Since then, UPenn has made five partial document productions to the committee, but has not fully complied with any of the eleven requests.
Brown offered 93 mostly public documents, followed by a second release of 48 documents. However, it has also failed to comply with the full scope of the committee’s requests.
The responses have been “inadequate,” the chairmen wrote in the Tuesday letters.
“Accordingly, the Committee is issuing compulsory process to obtain the documents and materials it needs to fulfill its oversight and legislative responsibilities,” they wrote.
A UPenn spokesperson told the Daily Pennsylvanian the school has “promptly and consistently engaged with the Committee and all of the Chairman’s requests including providing more than 8,000 pages of documents.”
“We will continue to cooperate with this investigation,” the spokesperson said.
The subpoenas follow an investigation into administrative bloat by Brown student Alex Shieh.
Shieh developed a database this spring, aiming to uncover why tuition had ballooned to approximately $93,000 per year, as previously reported by The College Fix.
“Administrators were analyzed in three domains,” including “legality, redundancy, and bullshit jobs, and those who raised the algorithm’s suspicion have been flagged for manual review,” he wrote in his database called Bloat@Brown.
He found that the university employs one full-time staff or administrative employee for every two full-time undergraduates.
Shieh presented his findings during a congressional hearing on June 4, the Washington Examiner reported.
“This isn’t education; this is bloat paid for on the backs of families who are mortgaging their futures for a shot at a better life,” he said.
“Across the pond, a world-class education at Oxford or Cambridge can cost about half as much as an Ivy League degree, in part, due to a much lower administrative burden,” Shieh said.
Brown and UPenn are not the only schools to receive a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee in recent weeks.
Last week, Jordan also demanded documents related to Harvard’s financial aid process, according to The Harvard Crimson.
“In a three-page letter to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, Jordan accused the University of failing to adequately respond to a prior request for documents related to its tuition-setting and aid policies. The subpoena compels Harvard to turn over the requested materials by July 17,” the Crimson reported.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: UPenn sign on campus; f11photo/Shutterstock